The world is flat, a calendar picture,
Picture-perfect,
Afraid of being crumpled by the hand of a God and
Used to shoot trash can-basketball baskets
In a small, lonely bedroom where the only one keeping score is the
Parakeet statue perched on the broken clock, staring.
It's always 2 o'clock.  
2 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in early November when
The whole world looks like it wants to curl up and cry  
So I curl up and cry for it,
13.6 billion years of tears dripping from green eyes
And a green heart meant for growing flowers and love songs,
Not crow calls and dreams that die in infancy
I float.
Salt water tears lapping around inside my ears
Maybe it will cover up the sound of screaming inside my bones
And the pretty girl swimming in my heart-lake
Laughing and stirring up the cold undertow of my thoughts and when I look at the sky
I see the cloud shadows against the blue,
Blue just a little too dark, little too deep,
Too deep, too dark,
The water beneath me too deep, too dark
I'm drowning and I haven't even left my bed
I wonder if that counts as talent.
Is this what it feels like to go mad?
2 o'clock my hands aren't attached to my body anymore,
They can't be part of me when they dance
Across desk tops looking for scissors and rummage through bathroom drawers to find razors.
That's not my blood in the sink,
It can't be because all my blood is locked up
Inside the red haze behind my anger,
Caught in sharp words like fish in a net,
Not my words but yet they fall from my mouth.
My room contains my screams
As they drip silently from teeth made crooked by too many lies.
The parakeet stares.
It's 2 o'clock but I don't know if it's a new day yet because the sky always looks dark
Outside my windows
So I shut my eyes and don't open the curtains.  
The world is collapsing,
The hands of God pulling down the picture,
Time's up, new calendar page,
I'm left behind,
Lost in the trash can pile of old words
And whispered thoughts.
The sky is too blue,
The water too deep,
I'm drowning.
It's 2 o'clock.

You have had me in every way
Rising mountains and flooded hollers
Gifted with everything, and I have nothing left to offer but this
This treasure of depravity
As you clean the crevices and ***** my mind
Worship, slather,  repeat
You delve in fiending for the taste
and with each pass of that silver tongue my thoughts get more tarnished
And you get...all of me
Taken in heat engulfed in passion
Drilled to the core
Filled with rapasciousness
I offered a gift and I was chewed up and swallowed
Consumed fully
Wanton abandon in caveman style of take what is yours
And that...I am

I've been told
that I'm built like a fencepost
Kind of wiry
A few knobs here and there
A knot or two for character
I make a pretty good fence
Good at keeping things inside
Not letting things out
But now my shadow seems leaner
Not quite as tall in the morning sun
The soil around my feet eroding
Drying out isn't all it's cracked up to be
Staying straight ain't easy
The herd is getting restless
And the barbed wire on my back
is tearing me up inside.

r ~ 7/25/14

Every Sunday without fail,
my father would set about getting us on the
family visiting trail.
A picnic was packed, along with our macs,
(Just in case of the rain) and into the car
we were packed.
A beautiful drive through winding roads,
over a bridge that made your tummy lurch,
onwards, to the Pen-y-Fal psychiatric hospital.

The Tudor Gothic style hospital loomed large to a
child in a car. Like a silent waiting beast from afar.
A Charming gathering of gables and chimneys,
disguised the interior of quite simply "the madhouse".
Set in grounds of 75 acres, patients played bowls, cricket,
and croquet. I thought the people and the grounds magical.
There was this secret place with adult children,
smiling, and talking to the trees, knowing of fairies,
I never heard their pleas.

As I grew older, I grew bolder, the same Sunday jaunt,
to our familial haunt, but now I was an explorer.
I was allowed in. In to the centre of the Gothic beast.
Green tiled, with brown heavy doors, antiseptic smell
that clung to every pore and cell of you. Stark walls,
scrubbed nurses, white coated Doctors and thuggish orderlies.
And after your eyes took in those sights, your nose that smell,
the noise crashed into you. Moans, cries, wails and pleas.
The sound of a thousand lost minds.

My aunt was one of the lost.
She never went home again.
She never visited her children.
She never visited her eleven siblings.
She stayed, stayed with her friend Pearl.
Who once told me I had Vivienne Leigh eyes.
She stayed with the randy Italian, the piano player,
the Downs people given to that 'hospital', that smell, that Hell.
She was in the belly of the beast.*

The Grade II Listed Building has been converted into luxury accommodation now, but would you sleep there?

There is a forbidden pleasure in the poet's art
it's like having an illicit ****** liaison, is it not?
now it can be told, that's the way one felt
enticing while evasive, was her two way dance.

In the secret society meeting last full moon night
for the first time I came face to face
with the enigmatic girl, rumored to be  the mistress
of the poet I admire, for his skills of allusion and  veiled speech
she was so young and somnambulistic in appearance
her lips were so thin, the only remarkable thing
still in memory those pale lips remain,
how helpless we are in a world, curtained off
to keep our secrets in rooms of green darkness!

The poet was absent, but he was very much present by that,
as her shame intrudes when she starts conversations.I found him there.
The words whispered from her lips were not heard, however one tried
none listened to it, I bet, a poet's mistress is as curious
as an  object of art, stolen from its rightful place, I suppose

When the boat returned to the island to take us back
we were the only passengers left, at last, how strange!
In turgid waters a fallen full  moon like a snake swam
I was looking at its wriggle, creating a tragic geometry
that reminded me her thin lips, she sat next to me, motionless
her soft breathing, was rhythmic poetry I kept imagining,
till we parted exchanging a faint smile. her's was florescent.

Engulfed by thick billows of smoke
Lungs filled with it, almost asphyxiated
Squeezing out the last ounce of life
Haze has blinded the vision of some
Hiding behind the threatening smoke
Smoldering emotions running high
Loved ones are torn away forcibly
Lives suffocating to premature death
Who will clear the engulfing smoke?
Wiping away emotions with billowing smoke
Tempers running high, mercurial rage
Engulfing even the perpetrators
Wisdom is on the verge of silent death
Engulfed by thick billows of smoke

...and i woke up, and
my motion persists, my
trailing light- split to trail-
lines, to curl out and line
up with your perfect
skin. imperfect smile, love,
it is invisible to all eyes:
shaking and glistening, i'd
give it all, for one simple quivering
moment spent with you. just
one photograph with palms
aligned. eyes alight. alas, for all
this is but nothing. all a ploy, you're
finding affection in patterns in
static, monumental, clawing eagerly
through the dark; here, it's high
noon. and i'm stone sober, and
missing you like malfunctioning
lungs. i haul breath to roll your
syllables over my tastebuds, again
more broken
glass down the back of my
skull just to steal a thought away
from inscrutable you. oh, honey,
the things i'd do...