"No, the serpent did not
****** Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

(20 minute poetry)

Everything is possible

That first step is probably the hardest one.

The deeper you've been
makes the light seem
more inviting
and biting the bullet to
take that first step is exciting in a dreadful
sort of way.

Everything can possibly be
I look in the mirror and see
it's the truth.

When the lights go out and the wind whistles
when your head's so full of thistles and thorns
It's hard to believe
you can move on and leave it behind you.

and it
is what never finds you if you don't let it
back
in

everything is everywhere
that
you want it to be

I look in the mirror
locked into me
and see
it's the truth.

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

to loneliness i seem
bound: it gave me
a soft kiss on the cheek
one night, then just as I could make out its face
scuttled off and I chased
and it hid, within me,
and I chase.
"come out come out
wherever you are", i shout
with the child-like playfulness
sawn off my bones once-upon-a-time
but loneliness feels like it's everywhere
     and the lonely are everywhere
     if one sees being nowhere as a place

my calls turn into a fluttering
fading echo bouncing
off these four walls i'm locked
between, a timbre that I taste
with my ears, and my tongue - bitten
for too long - tries to carve out
a new heart for itself
this time not out of stone.

an early escape
and the week slips by.
a year now, this person,
this professional.
a mask most days, after
years of silent obscurity.
experienced beyond academic
measure
friction and backlash.
but so what
a rock that's never been rubbed?
time marched its
cadence, the past
season folding in on itself
with little evidence of any
living.
december's throes
long forgotten
as those pristine sheets fade
the ocean existed then
and there was optimism.
laughter of course,
because there never really was.
a long goodbye as
a creative cork.
but the surface reappeared,
as it always does
and the bobbing slowed; shift.
finally time contracts
exposes its tears
to the open eye.
souls fall away and
mood affects the
framework. wanderers
passed, their souls sticky
and spring bounced onto stage.
suddenly the weekend looms, and visitors
promised.
the sound in the room slows
and the realization of
present creeps back
in on an endless loop.

As I lay here with my ear in between the cold ceramic tiles and my head,
I can finally let go of the fact that I never said:
You are a leech,
You are the loss of speech,
You are the pieces of broken glass one finds on the beach,
You are the hypocrisy,
That taught me not to **** where I eat,
You are the rug,
that clutches like quicksand,
Sinking its teeth into my feet,
Keeping me from moving forward,
And everything that has, is or ever will push me away from you,
Is a privilege and a favor.