I stand, face to the sun,
waiting for the ******
promised to me
by great, ancestral stars
and false prophets.

Your time will come,
and you will be free.

But their predictions
forsake me.

What I thought was freedom
was only a larger cage.

His niceties were inherent,
as were his empty bed
and the empty chair
placed next to his
at the small cafe table.

His women were nice,
clean and crisp,
but they only undressed
in the dark,
and they never
stayed the night.

He woke up
alone
and reaching
for no one;
praying for nocturnes
that never end
or a noose
that wouldn't slip,
when there was
nothing else
to be done.

Another night spent
between walls
that ooze sympathetic smiles;
drinking homemade wine
and raising my crystal glass
in a toast to my homeland-

Congratulations.
You've all gone
to waste.

The genius sheds his skin
beneath the weeping yew trees.
The stars bleed symphonies
into the night sky
and he is whole,
for the first time in his life.

The girl shakes little flakes of doubt
from the tips of her shaking fingers,
allowing it to fall to the forgiving earth.
She loves with an empty head
as chemical reactions combust
within her mortal veins,
and she is whole
for the first time in her life.

You were like the flowers
dying on my kitchen table.
Wilting away, and even so,
gifting me with flashes of color
and the unceremonious bloom
of a forgotten bud.

You were like Billy Holiday
at 3am on my busted record player;
just the slightest hiccup
in your melancholy.

You were an insufferable
embodiment of self-doubt,
nearly tangible in the
sun-starved days of winter.

You were an enigma,
plain and simple,
as nondescript as the fog
before a sunrise in September.

I used to think
that everything would be
easy;
that my pallid brain conveyed
some intricate foreshadowing
of a life unseen, but beheld
like landlocked love.

What I know now is this:
love is a place
without maps or atlases,
where the sea smolders
gracefully into
the horizon,
and my eyes are too tired
to look past the shore.

Gentle plutonium flows through
a cloud soaked sky.
The next breath is
somewhere
in the air all around me.
I cannot catch it
I inhale the scent of a city
to exhale the circular lengths
of lost civilizations held together
by faceless, mindless tycoons
and machine-gun fire.

Like the phosphorous spark
of distant fireflies,
words stirring like chemicals
to flash in unison.
So what is this now?
A cerulean tempo limited alone
by the accidental pausing
of an instant?
Stutter of the clock.
or these hidden iron
beats hammering rhythms
into my soiled heart.
Touch of an infinity
blood flow
with a pinch of glassy
thoughts that dwell on stilts over
a sea of miniature gods and
hourglasses and TV sets and
suicide beds.

Streetlights in the
windows talk
but do not offer a final
answer.

Hey, I think about you
nearly every day,*
he says
through the telephone.

And I stutter and falter
to tell him that I
do not think of him
at all.

I was born without
eyes, ears, or
a heart.

He said he liked her style
and her pianist fingers.
She told him that he could paint her
onto canvas, in shades
of cinnamon and ivory.

He laughed at her trembling hands
as she sat there, dressed in naught
but peonies and wild roses.
She scowled at his impudence
and then laughed
at the absurdity of it all.

She sat there and he told her
hold still
with a smile that flashed
across his eyes like quicksilver.

She watched him create poetry
with strokes of umber and chartreuse,
cerulean and scarlet.
He pulled the shadows from her eyes
and placed them into a fixed state of being.

She watched the metamorphosis of scars
into moonlit fault lines and
freckles into blips of smooth paint.

He transformed her pale outline
into a sensuous display of smooth gradients
and colors deep enough to make men weep.
He captured the penumbra of sorrow
and spread it across her painted eyes.

As he anointed the canvas
with delicate finishing touches,
She dressed in a paint-spattered shirt
and marveled at the uncanny likeness.

They sat and watched the paint dry
as he rubbed the knots from her shoulders
and kissed strained tendons and ligament
beneath innocuous flesh,
as she tapped rhythms into his hands.

He is no longer hers to consume.
He belongs now to the kingdom of earthworms
and a darkness that swallows all traces of light.
He took with him the chunk of her
that knew how to love as a human
and left her with shirts devoid of his form
and gradually losing his scent,
fragmented memories that slip
through fingers like sand,
and a room full of paintings
that she cannot bring herself
to uncover.

Color me in.
I lie naked and
wrapped in white linen-
A corpse.
If only my mind could
lie still as my body.

Let them carry me
to the incinerator.
But the pallbearers
have heard my death rattle,
they've found me out.

But I am an island now.
It is quiet here, only
remnants of Chopin

and little gold rings,
ashes,
a story in Braille,
what else have you got?

I'm so tired of being
the Phoenix in this tale.

Bone-white moon.
Lacrimosa caught
in the mechanisms.
Can you see me?

Of course not.
I blend in
with the sawgrass
and the catacombs.
With beach glass
and stones the color
of rust. I am a

microcosm.
Can you hear me?
My tragedy is in
the way I keep quiet.
Silence like ashes.
I am ethereal now.

This is my requiem.
Send my regards
to Mykonos.
Burn the screaming harp.
I am subterranean now.
Someday it will all turn
to gold.

Like love, these words
are just a means to an end.
Writing cryptic phrases
beneath the guise
of beautiful colors
and sun-stroked flesh.

These words are just
dark matter, from
an empty head.
Senseless chatter
in a poet's bed.

I watch you turn away,
as if you can't remember
how we got here.
I watch your hands
for a sign- there is
nothing but godless regret
and cold fingers
stroking my ego.

These words are not
what I meant to say.
Blue smoke curls and folds
and it is more than me;
More than this winter note,
I wrote for you.
My hands shake
and the walls murmur
with disapproval.

There is love in these words
but they come from a place
that transcends darkness,
where sorrow bleeds crystalline
and fills up every groove and sulcus.
These words are no good,
and my lips tremble
as apologetic syllables
go tumbling across the threshold.

These words are finite,
the end of an era.

When the fog dissipates
and the city skyline
winks into your clever retinas,
will you be satisfied
with what you see?

When those things you had forgotten
are worming their way back
into your bones and blood vessels,
will you still glance at the intractable sun,
awestruck and catatonic,
like a moth to the moon?
Will you still find beauty in
sidewalk weeds and broken glass?

When the fog dissipates,
and humanity presents itself,
brazen and unabashed,
in a flurry of chaos and stale dreams,
will you still fall into the mass
of faces and hands and ******* and eyes?

Or will you falter at the glaring sight
of a society that's run amuck?

You took the words
right out of my mouth
and then shoved them
down my throat.

And to you,  
it's just an afterthought,
a nod into space;
but I'm standing here
breathing oceans of static
in the small space
between us;
trying to fill the void.

You didn't hear the love
spilling out from the spaces
and cracks between my words.
You couldn't hear the apologies
in my silence.
You didn't feel the way
I held your name
on the tip of my tongue,
and really, I don't blame you.

If only to appease you,
I'd crawl back to the shore
and drift back out to sea,
dissolve into a memory.

I just hope that you might
remember me
the way I used to be.

Borne into a frenzy
of sleepless black nights
that coil and surround me,
where chimeras and serpents
glide like paint,
in the sea that separates
the mind and the horizon.

I flail and sputter,
treading naught
but black water.
Just leave me here for awhile.

every word that comes tumbling out
of your superfluous lips
is loaded with wholesome irreverence,
weighing leaded and cruel upon my heart
by the pale recycled light of the moon.

déjà vu lingers before my bleary eyes
again,
as crumbs of flightlessness
slip through my fingers, again.
and I can see you unfolding us,
dissecting us, laying out all of the pieces
in a heart-wrenching vivisection.

and I know you can't really **** something
that's been near death for years,
but when do you give up
on resuscitation?

you played me like a mandolin,
striking notes like broken glass
in the space between your wayward sheets.
your hands were my compass,
your eyes the Adriatic Sea-
and I plunged into the depths
like an albatross,
fawning over wide open spaces
and beautiful colors.

yes, you played me like a symphony,
my body ebbing and flowing
in ghastly syncopation.
notes like honeysuckle and lilac
coursing through my bloodstream-
capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava
and straight on into my heart.

and you'd be ecstatic to know
that I haven't heard such a haunting refrain
since you went away.

but it's difficult
when everything
around you
is so beautiful;

beautiful and fated
for disaster
and decay.

you sound like broken glass
and your hands..
your hands,
are otherworldly creatures
roving over my flesh
like so much unclaimed land.

I smile, I hate you.
punched out cigarettes
lie smoldering in the ashtray
and I thought I could hear
the point of impact
in your hurried sentences.

I'm not worth the trouble,
I never wanted this anyways.
I just wanted to stand
at the edge of where the sea
meets the land and
taste the air in May.

I just wanted to know
what it
*felt like.

in a city that breeds hooligans
ingrates and indecencies,
where the architecture of a lost era
crumbles into brothels and madhouses,
where shootings peak
with the heat of summer,
where new windows are boarded up daily
and we chop down trees like fanatics,
in the city I call home,
in the city I love,
destroyed by its ignorance,
I am condemned to silent pleas
and empty stares.

perpetually human,
romanticizing the madness
of a world that's come undone.
oil paintings of the sea
hang upon the walls of our minds
and we marvel at the sorrow
mimicking beautiful colors.

cryptic fingers stroke our egos
and tell us that we will persevere,
that we are the ******
of evolutionary prose.
lunar rays beam down on us,
shrouding us in a gentle glow
and we almost believe
that we could be infinite.

it's too late to fret
about decisions made
and ties cut, past tense.
it's hard to see it
without the glaring minutiae
of my demise.
I'm scanning the walls
for a change of subject-
Polaroids and butterfly carcasses,
city skyline sketches
and old cigarette advertisements
in gilt gold frames;
satisfy yourself.

my mind is saturated
with degenerate cogitation-
a stew of pantheons
and painstaking nihilism.
my bones are brittle
and begging to break
and my eyes are growing heavy,
with the weight of it all.

but I've an inclination towards
laurels and violet,
celandine and foxglove;

the wildflowers you plucked
in the sunlight of our summers.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
voracious daydreamer,
how dare you
upset this delicate orbit.
your hands were the kiln
for my sloppy and misshapen mind,
but that was nothing,
relatively, compared to the way
your eyes reflected lost souls.
my dear, it's a catastrophe.

now when the moon chides me,
and the stars reek of your smile,
I run my hands across
the fronts of empty dresses
that you wore years ago.
Ophelia, Ophelia,
I recall the way your eyes shone
like the peak of madness
and how your shoulder blades
touched in a subtly avian manner.

how simple are the remnants
of your existence, of your melancholia,
I cling to them like a ***** to touch-
and I know they will bring you no closer.
stale shadows haunt my lingering eyes;
where you should be standing
I see only lost time.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
smoldering star in my hindsight,
stone in my chest-
I'm sad to see you go.

fall asleep in a strange place,
the moths are quivering
beyond a thin membrane of glass,
mistaking fluorescent light
for that of the moon

devour the air of an unforeseen tragedy
unfolding within your aura,
lying silent beneath the sheets.
the sun will kiss you in the morning,
in mourning, as you clutch the banister
for a pseudo-sense of balance
as the rug is pulled from under your feet
and colors meld together
until you can't see straight
and your mind is dumb as hematite.

strangle the doubts bubbling up
inside your brain
and fill the void with lithium
and mindless chatter,
an ******* onslaught of stuttering normality.
you are Atlas
shedding the weight of the earth.

**** it, you may as well be
another faceless face in the sea of glimmering
white noise and chemical delirium.

give in, give up,
assimilate
with your filthy brethren..
living is so much easier
when your head is empty.

Slip down into the
temporal lobe of my
aching brain,
crescendo of *******
organic effects.

I draw the shades and
hold my head in pale winter hands,
allowing oceans of cerulean sorrow
to fill my lungs,
and you say what you will,
and you say that you're right,
and I fold
beneath the weight of
your shadow.

some days I can wake up
and understand why the world
does what it does.

today, the sun strikes chords
on my naked spine
and I roll over, retreat
beneath blankets and sheets.

I falter at the thought of
senseless murders
land mines and apartheid
babies starving
and mothers dying
in an epidemic of ungodly
proportions.

what's the use, anyways?
nobody's winning if
we're all losing.

**** poor, dying for a dream,
or a drink, one more cigarette,
the landlord comes around, asking for rent
and the money is gone, it was never there,
so you smile and bat your eyes,
one more week, I promise

soon he'll be at your throat
with eviction notices that scream
louder than stereotypes of poverty
louder than your baby's growling stomach
louder than all of your meticulous schemes.
are you uncomfortable yet?
I've barely scratched the surface.

the stereotype that you fell into
doesn't suit you, single mother
wiping off tables and smiling your hardest
to make tips, bend a little further,
hike up your skirt, show some leg
some ***, let them see your ****,
generous patrons love that ****.

you go home and scream into empty spaces
and curl into cold corners thinking of
Bukowski in cockroach rooms
eating candy bars to survive
and dream of an end to a means.
you play some Tchaikovsky
and hold your own flesh and blood
close enough that they can't leave you,
drink White Russians until your hands melt
and write **** that nobody wants to read
about your struggles, knowing that
you will be gifted with rejection letters
and apologies.

**** poor, it is a way to live
but if you prefer sanity, not one
that I would suggest.
it will devour you
destroy you, upend your hopes
and shatter your dreams.
god will not help you,
nor the state or the politicians,
but if you make it out alive
you could be stronger than
diamonds, harder even than
your own resolve.

he told me,
you are the strangest creature
that I have ever laid eyes on.
and what could I say?

I am a curator of slick thoughts,
cigarette thin and clinging
like mad to my small sense of resolve.
a stranger in a house of ghosts,
writing phantom epitaphs and
combing through scientific journal articles.

I am no mystic, but a logical anomaly.

stranger things have happened.

I lied when I told you
that I was okay, that
colors were still colors
and that my thoughts
were still pure.

you should've known better,
dear, that I am the dirtiest
form of clean, gritty smile
and the inescapable nature
of a poet.

don't look so surprised
at the words that bounce
off the roof of my mouth.
I know you shudder at
my carelessness, at my
inclination to destruction,
but don't look at me that way,
darling.

don't come around,
if you can't thrive on decay.
don't think twice about leaving,
I never promised you a martyr.

wake up, the sun is cold
amongst the din of mourning doves
and impossible airwaves.

breathe, are you ready for
the apocalypse of silent words?
stuttering silver mercury
and glimmering plasma
tracing paths in your brain,
and the sun is cold,
so cold, and the coffee is black

and, my lover doesn't even know
who I am anymore.

I wish that I
could fall in love
with a female,
for she would make
a far better muse than
the gruff sailors and musicians
and drunks and men
in general that I am
inclined to crave.

to write about
a painted pout or
skin that brushes against
your own like nylon,
sunlight shining through
the window onto a Cupid's bow
and dancing down to
a delicate clavicle, or
black eyelashes that bat
and blink remorse
into your cavernous heart,
to muse over such aesthetic
delights, would be
ecstasy for my poetess heart.

I linger, staring, at beautiful
women, androgynous women,
delicate, feline women,
stringing words
together in my head
over long legs and
hair that flutters like silk,
and they think I'm crazy
or in love with them.
well, maybe I am crazy,
but I crawl into bed each night
with my snarling, gleaming,
mahogany gentleman,
and I love him madly,
my rugged muse.

alone, there are worse things,
like being an artist
trapped between microcosms,
unable to make eye contact,
or wasting away in suburbia,
stuck on photographs
of Venus and Cetacea,
or reading Bukowski to
a room full of preachers and
PTA goddesses,
or mourning the specimens
spread and pinned to a board.

yes, there are worse things
than alone; did I mention
slithering black nights
and the touch of bare skin
when you've forgotten
how to love?

it's too late to realize
such small truths,
we simply adjust.

days like this, gray sky
over coastal grandeur,
I sit and look out across
the rubble of a city,
the rubble of our souls;
what a ******* mess
we have made.

the gulls loop and dive,
screaming, into the
winter lake, and all
the classical music
in the world couldn't compare
to the dull sorrow
of this moment;
such a beautiful contrast
of trash and gold.

we are all, every one,
searching for something
beautiful, something
to hold that won't turn
to stone.

The urge to create, to write
to paint to compose
is only a disillusioned
form of madness.

But great art can come
of madness, and
sorrow can birth
extraordinary genius,
so embrace your
defects and fault lines,
for normality
is a fate
worse than death.

six deadbolts
and a loaded gun
tucked beneath your
pillow, what are you
waiting for love?
is it the rapists or
the sociopaths or
the criminally insane
come to shatter your
suburban dream?

they may come for you,
or maybe you are
one of them.

it doesn't really matter
anyways, you'll still
rise when you rise,
laugh when you can
and never, ever cry-
that would make you
human. you'll still
be seeking answers
if you're lucky and
pretending to know
what love is
in a dark, dark place.

everything will go to ****
on its own. be wary
not of the sociopaths
but the preachers
of god, of love, of war,

be wary of
your own mind.

lonely lonely,
you leave me so,
inside out watching
the stars burn out
in an emptying
of cosmic sorrow..

and tomorrow I know
the sun will smile at me
your kisses will taste
like honey and
the birds will romance me
with slaughtered butterflies
and sweet lamentation.

But today,
I've been tuning radio static
to white noise and
flashes of Chopin,
trying to recreate a feeling
from shadows and memory.

don't leave me lonely,
dear, make love to
me in the hypnagogic
stare of the rising sun.
play me soft as buttercups
and foxgloves;
piannissimo,
gentle as death's
watchful eye.

time is an hourglass
glued to the table,
and the world outside
has gone quite mad,
my dear.

rats in the gutters
and a soundtrack of
nine millimeters
resounding through
the air; and didn't i tell you
life was beautiful?

the shooting stars now,
they look a lot like bombs
as they make their way
to the shrieking silence
of dry land.

the golden babies laugh
their golden laugh
as a million more are lost
or left for dead in the
alleys of my mind
and didn't I tell you
this would all be so very
lovely?

don't fret now, baby,
the skies will soon catch fire
and the madhouse
will bloom
and thrive.

I was going to write you something
that embodied our love, some
infinitesimal prose about
your name click-clacking off of
my tongue or your eyes
when you're smiling.

I was going to answer all of
the questions that are silently ticking
inside your mind and scrawl
perfect prepositions across the page
so that your hands might
falter as they traced the corners.

I wanted to tell you about
the tug of your presence or
the way that your fingerprints
feel against mine,

but I'm writing this instead,
listing off the beauty that I feel
seeping into my skin and
it doesn't really make sense
but that's just the way it falls
onto the paper, bit by bit.
sad things, serenade me.

I'm only romanticizing
the madness of it all.
I never asked to be
a ******* poet.

how strange; you leave me
hanging on to your words
like parachutes, a smile
dancing across my gratuitous
face; appalachian eyes
the color of melancholy
and mouth of a sailor.

you said, I never thought
that I would miss you
quite this much.
...and my very heart
swooned at the idea of
you, so very far away,
so close to me.

come home to me,
darling, I want to tell you
how much I've missed you.

there are these things like summertime
sadness and frosty windows,
moth wings and the cosmos
and goose flesh and miniature houses
with miniature chairs and

hourglasses and sun-soaked
sheets in the morning and your lips
against mine, hollow bones
and thin blue veins and the
delicacy of synapses and nerves,
reoccurring thoughts and images;
my intimacy with them is
alarmingly sensual;
like the honeysuckle curve
of a bare shoulder,

shadows of hands on walls
and the nectar of your kiss.
things that haunt me and
dance before me,
the epitome
of grace.

i know your demons,
and I kiss them on their pale and
broken foreheads to appease you.
i know the map of your skin,
of your bones, like white gold.

my hands are shaking
as the stars collide and
the dust of them lingers in
your eyelashes; and
i should detest you
by now, but you have
this way of consuming me
with the shadows in your
irises, but i

exhale- a breath like the
million before you came,
a plume of smoke,
radio static.

smoldering desire lights
upon my tongue and
infiltrates my thoughts.

and it is overwhelming,
everything at once;
our love may be a chronic
illness, but
the delirium is
hauntingly
beautiful.

that fizzy chemical
feeling
wraps itself around
my veins.
again. again.

not again.

i am full of blue smoke
and voracious wind voices.
i am full of melancholy
and still-born
dreams.

i miss you,
there, in the mirror.
you shine like
forgotten sun,
laugh like
terrific miniature
gods.

i am acetylene now.
i am neither human
nor beast. i return
to the ashes and ether
from whence I came.

i don’t belong here,
living as a fox among
the pheasants.

bugs and little blue stars
crawl from my eye sockets-
they hiss and pop in the light
and burn my transparent flesh.

glow like phosphorous.
grow like weeds.
bend like my spine.

you are not
permanent.
you will float off
on shiny orbs of soulless
plastic. helium smile,
chrysanthemum hands.

there is a girl made of stardust
and ocean salt, breathing static
into the night sky.
her love, if tended to
with patient hands, would
grow like wild roses across
the trellises of your heart.

she is not born of men;
but a child of luna,
sweet mother.
she is a breeze in July
softly rustling your hair
and the plague of
heatstroke and withered
tongues that swiftly follows.
her touch lingers into
the winter solstice.

she is the wave of sorrow
sweeping over your bones
and the light in your eyes
shining with leftover love;
a shadow dressed in white,
a consummation of grief.

she is a wallflower, a habitual
offender to the gods.
she will nurture you like an infant
and then leave you on your knees,
gasping for redemption.

black morning- the birds fall apart
beyond the curtain, forgetting their lines,
and the regret hangs around my neck
like a talisman.

the knives are sound asleep in their
wooden block and, alas,
the gas still warms the house.
yes, this is clarity pressing her fingers
to my temples and lifting the fever
of earthworms and giants.

your face still haunts me
but only in the dark womb of sleep,
that cruel temptress.
you come like a shadow and
I am dressed in black, patiently
waiting to consume you.

clarity comes upon awakening,
when I discover how easily the dirt
and grit of your smile
washes away.

c'est la vie,
I can stand on solid ground.

i've been building sentences
for you, because there are
too many words to keep them
stagnant and docile.

oh, words on melancholy smiles,
chipped porcelain and
sunlight dappled through your hair
like the sun herself had
kissed the crown of your head.

i've been writing you letters
inside of my head. little golden
pinpricks of love
seeping through my cells
because my body cannot hold
the very idea of loving you.

in those moments, i am liminal,
held tight by the arch of your spine,
the pads of your fingers,
the way that you held my name
in your mouth before
it rolled off of your tongue and
the smell of your skin
in a dark room, with only
the moon watching us
woefully, sweetly.

words like saccharine and
your name, slow like honey,
taste sweet enough
to make me cry.

i've been stuck on the idea
of loving you, loving me
and wringing my hands
over bad luck, mon petite chou.

and still, you close your eyes,
clasp your hands over your ears
and brush off my words like
dust or snowflakes or
unrequited love.

you glide across the floors
of my imagination with the
gait of a silverfish and
a name just as deceptive.

and i sweep you beneath
the rug or erase you
with a stamping of gilded feet
or bury you beneath heaps
of discarded memories
until your features fade
and you are nothing more
than a lost relic,

a watercolor portrait
too beautiful to keep.

stuffing stolen oxygen
into my secondhand bag,
and smiling up at the
butter sun;
the ancient groundskeeper says,
earth mama, you should be
doing pirouettes
in Santa Ana, stumbling
barefoot bright sidewalks
in Albuquerque.

I nod and get in my car
feel my soul twitch
and I am astounded that
the trees haven't
found me out
yet, that the lilies
haven't strangled me
in my sleep
yet.

maybe I’ve been here
too long too long
maybe I need to go
where the sun is
relentless..

1500 miles to Albuquerque

has spring arrived
already?
i brace myself
and wait-
boughs bent  and
naked.

but, there are no
fluttering cherry blossoms
here, nor golden
nightingales.

i brace myself against
promises of gods
and false prophets
shivering in the wind.

cede fortunae,
they say to me.

i was destined
for this.