A darkness crept into my waking crypt,
Its tendrils coiled to grip my tortured throat,
Till retching, retching, gurgled on a rote,
Prostrate, held in its clutches, tightly gripped —
No eye perceived this devil as it slipped
From day to blackened day inside to gloat;
An instrument was I to sound its note,
A plaything used, discarded, broken, stripped —
The world became a window; The outdoors
Turned alien; The beast remained inside,
Content to keep the prison of my mind —
From time to time I dared unto the stores,
        But ever on returning I would find
        The nightmare waiting where we both reside.

poetry does not sleep in my hand
and kindness is something I value as
half true almost as often as people
mistake what I am now
for what I will be when I
am neither magnanimous
nor synchronized
with what I was before
in the circular continuum
where I am flailing on all
edges and slopes of your sea
like a valley; on all fours,
all aspects of me
are all aspects of me
and I am whole
where I am gentle
where I am cruel
and where I, a pacifist
ignite these wars between us
I am digging these moats to embody
and receive all we drink in
each other that is chaos and peace
will always be there to refill the cup
of your heart as my purpose in life.

A pocketful of doom is flourishing
ceiling to wall in my cranium,

and though I tend to the tantrum of it
with fatherly, nurturing discipline

it acts as a nebulous cumulonimbus
fog seething with diffusion of void,
breaking through every window of warm

out to the inside I tend to become

an accidental abuser, flailing teeth
into over-ripened words, knocking
unripened fruit from the bough between us.

With nerves like coiled snakes in an apple,
prismatic minds are dulled to a fractal
of their former spectral rainbow
when expunged into the shadow.

Thorough rage—event horizon
clawing sides of deep depressions,
cusping manic at the fervor—

when the cliff becomes the shackle
of the neurosis-fed darkness jackal

open demise toward the mouth of the sun
and perhaps tongue at infinite light.

this is not my life. we are fighting, as though
we are happy, but.my dad is
dying. i love him. as though i am a child.
as though i were a sapling at his root.
as though i were a construct of his being
as i am
i am
happy. as though i am a child. i am giving
as i will not take what i cannot give him
in his grave. he is wilting, as i realize i am
alive, and i will give him every inch of every
root that i am, constructed on the skeleton
he has given me. with life. within himself
as he is
he is
happy. as though he were a child forever.
as though he were a mighty spread tree.
as though we could love each other
beyond the end.