Navigating mercy

An asylum harbor from afar

Here, in the gloaming of your closed
notebooks

A faint-hearted horizon

And the wide beam sea

Two days out from despair

The written word will capsize
you, Anne

God is in your typewriter
and where the boats so often go

This chalice of night
that I carry around
I’ll surrender to you
as a shackled slave
--
Love me an apocalypse
Love me asunder
Your long ebbed serenity
does little to allure me

What is chastity
if not another name
Another anklet tinkling
above the goat’s hooves

the goats, the lambs

So many have you dragged
through the chattering streets
As gazes ***** their skins open
So may have you quietened
--
Love me a massacre
Love me fanatic
My sweet ashen purity
is too frail a goddess

So long have I beautified
this altar that I bear
The blooms now sing
of pleas long dried
And gore sleeps soundly
in cracked stones

A lamb, a lamb follows
Another treads on behind
Carved out of my own bright flesh
Stilled with blades chanting
my name
--
Love me a mayhem
Love me turbulent
The tinkles still linger
long dead the screams

Let them now

Bring on the maidens
and bring on their men
Let begin the ritual
Let spurt out the dark

Let tinkles dance
above ashen blooms
Let lambs be smothered
beneath tumbling stones
Let none be silenced
Let echo the songs

I do not wish for quiet now
--
Love me an apocalypse
Love me asunder
You, a darkness within
I, a crumbling altar
--
This chalice of night
That I carry around
I carved and filled out
my own bright flesh

I do not wish for quiet now

Yet you love me so

desperate fragments
stanching some belief
in existence
how many times do we speak
some vestige of a faith
childlike and vacant
am I broken enough now
am I broken enough now
to turn this mold to dust
crushing the structures
of false interpretations
falling to nothing
such comfort in zero
words crawl through the veins
of what we want to be
not what we are....

Metropolis is dust,
the smoke of unfaded coffin nails,
she's a sensual bonfire
littered landscape,
the burning lust running in my veins
between safety and risk,
circumcising the stage
where Dylan went electric.
~
"I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.”

Swing-shifting to mercenary mode,
but sinking my face value
by ordering takeout religion,
sharing a cab with Hepatitis C,
and all those sky-high boxes
and rectangles
—existing in one, spending nights
with her in another.
~
"Oh, lay me down to sleep
upon the trickery of time."
~

Today my mind drifts to a place
Familiar and mysterious the ocean breeze
Gushing and rippling with happiness
The waves curl and crest
On the sandy shore quietly rest
Are they free, free enough to not wave
Or are they truly bound
To the shore and the sea
Like a wild song, bound by lyrics
And the rhythmic beats