The moon shines a cool blue tonight
as we entwine our fingers, laying on the baseball field
beneath diamond heavens. We lie
in silence, in the moments when the Universe reveals
itself, and contemplate the distances between one celestial body to
another, the space between
us growing as I turn south
to find Orion while you seek Cassiopeia in the north.

Shooting stars cross the sky, and we wish separately on dead
stars and dead dreams, lights already grown red and extinguished
as we whisper in the dark, passing
between phases.

And in the end we're all left searching.

I only prayed to the moon after it rose beyond
my window, the white sill a frame for waning
crescents and gibbouses--milk-drowned gods
dripping stars as they climbed skeleton branches--
some nights resting behind flood-heavy clouds.
People say the moon has a face, but
I have yet to see it sneer at my sins even as it tastes
my ocean-drop tears, evaporated into sky-bound veils,
brushed along the shadowed craters ...

The moon itself bemoaned imperfections in midnight
wind creaking branch against branch until I woke
slow from sleep--sad light staining my walls
pallid, pale as my own skin, glowing in muted
television shows left running while I dreamt
the moon spilled a star between my ribs--
dim luminescence radiating warm,
and the star, seeping through my pores, thawed
the ice I had prayed to melt in the first place.

Such to break surface, the framed glassy pool reflects
With me, upright, the still-life foregrounded as its own
Pale imitation. But I see it, there, between my vague eyes
And evaporating pores populating a single empty window
Devoid, a full of life—or so I am to believe.

That tree is happy, incomplete and passive, wayside,
It contemplates its own dream, nostalgia is its willful present
In the moment, there are but ripples in which the tree smiles
Happy to know it is here, it is alive, it is me—just as my fading
Bliss is real in the glass. I am happy for the tree: being of difference.

What never can be, it shall, in spite of metaphor
To be like is to be, but too pure be is to abhor.

It turns, a rebel, from the pool: no fiction of cast nor questioning;
That plastic Narcissus cannot hear the Echo of a captured face:
Where Exit signs sigh in their own irony trapped, here, there,
It is by its own imitation it must comfort the erraticies—
Sadly, she weeps uttering the same mantra on her lips,
But by design, she has curses on her brow, anger at her mimicry
Which hides her from the dream she lives, still weighted by
Wonder, still holding onto God. She sees nothing but the calling back.
Is but the voice of a Lover, of trapped souls in a tenement window,

She can only hear herself talking infinitely
Presence to the water, commune her ‘I’ unto me.

While I am free to glide about the room, the panoramic view
Of two minds’ madness, I, too, feel a pool on which my beloved Self
Reveals to me the seconds it took to create,
The voices which, vague, came as mine
And I stole away quietly, to believe me a tree, and to go ahead and dream.

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
    in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
    where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
    or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
    is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
    about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
    implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
    and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
    who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
    like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
    should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
    caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
    playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
    blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
    graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
    brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
    while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
    the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
    joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
    there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
    an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
    some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
    cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
    and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
    away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
    in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
    the simple sum of heart plus heart.

still anchored in the dust of materialistic hopes
the remedies for a long lived fleshy cartoon
come readily to hand when the silver in your purse
is bursting to be spent and be rubbed in others hands
ah I am rich says the cartoon of a man as he cant sleep
counting all that money he swears he will never spend
ah yes I sit on the pinnacle of mankind and see for miles
a future in paradise on earth blessed with eternal life

The road behind bares us a backdrop, too many nights find us fractured in our thoughts and the dreamers we once were are far from the two people who stand today.

We're broken, mere splinters of our shipwreck past, driftwood on a shore that drowns every time the ocean breathes.
The path is littered with slaughtered dreams that didn't bleed.

As time and tide wait for no man shall we find it a tragic scene?
simply erased with the sunsets demise?
No one gets away without a scar and mine speak a road map to chaos
and a found hello to you.

Mine own scars are fingertips
gouged into the sand and faded
but salted by tears of the ocean, inerasable by the tide.
A soul washed up upon the shore, a road map etched delicately into fine bones.
You can trace where I'd been before. All roads lead to your hello.

In broken lines and have uttered phrases and one too many empty night.
Backdrop of chaos does paint in the darkest colors you could ever imagine .

How does it gets so flawed by our own creations and vices my dear?
Does it still ring ever so true?

The bell rings true whispering distant voices
Empty nights are just bottles lined up as dead soldiers
We contemplated our own truths and fell victim to our own vices
The backdrop is black, no colour beneath skin.
Honestly? Where does our downfall begin?

Two ships underneath the nightscape past the spark once understood the flame and nothing more .
In empty alleys, like cats to prowl, we find our moments, and then bury our thoughts to lay for no others to see.

half written papers and half heard conversation the keys of the piano haunt the silence as myself shadows that still remain.

Nothing is but a thought and those are like dead flowers laid to waste a reflection of far better times

The night crawls to meet the day as it has so many times before.

The thought of the minds bottle lay empty upon the table.
A fond farewell is but a sugar coated goodbye.
And I seldom have minced my words to mask their sting.

The page forever bleeds.

Pages that lay scattered on a ***** floor
Bleeding ink into cracks
that will forever more
hide the spirit of our souls.