In spite of everything,
I arranged flowers over my skin in a great effort to be worshiped
made myself into a garden for your plucking

I didn’t know how much of me was woman
and how much was girl

But you knew what I was
and what I would become under your caress
In spite of everything,
I offered up the entirety of my being to you
gave your selfish hands each blooming flower that you desired
For I was half asleep with longing for you
A cooing dove to your touch
and only yours

I did not have a heart to love you
until you sculpted it out of stone
and somehow you still could not understand
that it was made for you alone

I had only hoped to love you
to get lost in the center of the storm of you
to live on as an atom of your heart

I cannot go on hanging in the suspension between Earth and sky -
caught in the perpetual pull of dark stars
and drawn back down again into the twisting roots of the Earth
I'm laid out, **** between them
soaking with rainwater and scorched by the swelling moon
The wind shivers and daydreams tremble to white
craving some fleeting outline or living complexities
I would like to be carved as stone to put an end to this floating
but I'll wait here until you let me live as human

Don't cry, strange beauty -
The river and the wind listens
And cries gently with you

until then, we shared a shy love
the kind of love that did not yet have a voice to speak
we lingered in those silent gardens
dandelions, snow drops and jasmine
we lingered longer in those gentle traces of fingertips over soft skin
those quiet, dimpled glances in the stairway
and i wish we lingered longer still

until we spoke, our love was shy
and then we were frightened of the voice
i had only hoped to love you
unabashedly & gently love you
but the sound rang and rang in our ears
and now our love is a different animal entirely -
it gnaws away at the soft flesh that it used to trace

until then, we shared a shy love
but now, we don't love for the quiet
we love for the hunger that must be fed

I was surrounded by strangers as I looked out of the cruel airplane window - your horizon fell back with agonizing ease
and my soul became an eroding cliff
Bits of dying rock tumbled back down onto your shores
by no will of their own but by the natural grace of gravity

As i recall this now, feet chained to the under side of the universe,
part of me celebrates that half of my soul is missing from my chest
because it means that part of me still lives and breathes somewhere within you

The half light of sunset stretched itself past those sleeping giants on the shore - my lover said they looked like shy snails with their heads buried beneath the sand, as the light made its way into our hungry eyes

In a place made up of my own dreams,
the rocks timidly cover themselves with moss and vine.
Even in this place, made up of the purest honey and lullabies,
absence was conquered
not with a sword or a battle cry
but with a gentle sigh that brushed up against castle stone, the soft melancholic pull that inverted my chest

Why are you harbored so far off from the shore?
My dearest isle of dreams

From this fragmented stretch of time
from my strange heart away from this monotonous dream
I can feel myself exist
not in any tangible or beating form
but in the occasional breath that sails in from distant, trembling summer winds
in the moonlit and barefoot dance
a symphony of sun flickering on the forest floor
my lovers eyes
all of these places which are separate and fleeting
are the only places I ever am

Sea foam and moss covered rocks
sing thick songs of sad rage in solitude
I'm tangled and tossed in their sound

When the lavender and bluebells sleep
You bloom to the moon
When the stretching morning doves drape their songs over sunbeams
Your dozing and banished petals are lost
What sacrifices would you make for the night
For the wolves
For those great and dying stars?
Moonflower,
How many more would you make?
How much more would you miss?

Autumn almost feels like it belongs to places like these
Places that lounge in the waning maple sun
Places that graze on slow, foggy hymns of October
It's like they are quiet testaments to the dream that is Autumn

Far off are you, praying for your abandoned youth
A dream dripping of honey and rosy cheeked naivety
Tendrils of chestnut and bouncing curls would cradle a face of polished glass

You would spin in those bell like circles, giggling
Giggles which were hymns
And then you turned and turned into that place which cracked that glass face

There's an abundance of wild, suspended poems hanging above our heads but there's hardly enough words to describe them down to earth.

What you've done to me is like autumn to the leaves
You've lulled me down onto the ground
And cast me into slumber
There I'll lie
All dull and dry
What once was green is umber

The shape of you is like a bottomless purgatory
like a living thing but never at all
Desperately I've clawed at those spaces
trying to carve you out of them

Just your shape
Your perplexing, invisible and selfish shape

My breath fogs the glass of the restaurant window
All humidity and rain through which there is still no shape
that could be salvaged as yours
I'm covered in soil in those spaces
I'm buried in the shape of you

These torments of life and death meet at those great and mawing jaws of beasts and angels
You, the embodiment of innocence, were swallowed hole
Sinking inch by inch into the cruel sacrifices of God and consumption.

I saw you with your eyes wide open as you finally reached the edge of the precipice of that pink and hungry throat
Being crushed at your soft places to fit into that great and lifeless void that forced itself upon you, drawing you inside

I saw you as your face was last seen to the world
Panicked, squawking
And then submissive to that insurmountable grip, that great disappearing

You were swallowed hole
And there he sat upon a sunny rock, digesting and wholly alive

Your fingers, which used to trance the slopes of my skin, only touch air and exertion
Your eyes, which used to remind me of Moroccan waters, have been smothered out by their own memory
So blatantly intangible, it's as if they never were blue
Ash has settled in the spaces we would lie
Our heartbeats replaced with elements of loneliness and lust
So I've been neither here nor there
Floating, suspended- like a star hung out to dry
Lost for a heart and yellowing out on the wind

Draped over your braided thoughts
there lies lace and little beauties
It is almost a sort of glaring cruelty
that you clasp it, white knuckled and selfish
wholly absent from this hollow place

Underneath rests sweet innocence, a harbinger of angels,
souls and quiet romanticism
Eyes closed to that flickering flame which gasps, dying so steadily at your suspended little toes
You are still, frozen
other than those fluttering eyelashes and hungry eyes that look up at those beautiful and wicked angels which lilt only for you

The lies we tell of God
Are no baptisms in a dripping moon
No cleansing in and of sunlight
No anointing me of Earth

The lies we tell of God
A mark of mortal rage
A mourning that glows and devours
The fingerprints of our ancestors

The lies we tell of God
are the lies we tell of ourselves

I would capture you on film
All silvery in the moonlight
You were a swan in my minds eye
Cursed to your white purity
Cradled inside of your perceived fragility
But you were not fragile at all, were you?

You held the moon beneath your ribcage
And your breath - the night could not go on without

Bound to a shadow
No knowledge of the flesh that casts
All of these thoughts must reveal me somewhere within your mind
Somewhere like a cave
Deep and knowable only to those dark creatures
Like you and I

Or maybe it doesn't exist at all
Along with my idea and these thoughts which evoke no consequence
Maybe I'm somewhere like a desert

There was a dream in depth
That rose only where you were
A place where spring grew louder
A place where winter blurred

The dream was of an amber glow
And all of our demons lay slain
You held me deep within you
With all the others you have maimed

There was a dark blue sky
That grew darker by the day
It might have only been in my mind
This sky that’d be black someday

Closing my eyes and I imagine
That place where we would stay
You held me in your broken arms
And told me it would be okay

I would like to revel in my own ******
Own it as I own the things which were once my fleeting desires
But I’m hidden within wrought iron fences, which dehydrate an indigenous testimony
Bits of a reticent self volatilize within the dead of night
Like a whole civilization strangled and erased from history

Spring grows louder here

Here where moss licks my toes and where the Earth breathes below
Torn through frost and fallen leaves
A golden and divine light that grows and grows and grows
Spring, take my soul, possess my eyes and bury me in soil
Do all of these things to make me a part of spring

I saw my name on the corner of your mouth
like a tear stuck between lips
If your heart beats like mine, say it aloud
If your lingering glances stay fleeting, swallow them whole

Sad eyes of scribbles underneath your furrowed brow
Weather beaten, masticated, bashed
The lines of your face burrow and settle in to dwell
They check their mailboxes, set up lemonade stands
And drudge up demons beneath pores
Once you were alone in your purity
The occasional blemish or two
Nothing to make into cities
Nothing like decrepitude

Our hands, like branches, reach toward the sun
Fingers stretched, curved and twisted to avoid shadow
And, like branches, our relentless journey to warmth
Makes us intricate and familiar

Where I dwell now
Beneath the busy streets
Inside jealous palms
Atop of an echo
I'm still in the solitude of spring
and like a spider curling in on itself,
I depart

The paralysis of your force inscribed invisible bruises
Their hues of purple and blue
Your spirit of **** greed lingers, consumes these moody October nights until there’s nothing left but bloodless trees and even those turn their bark inside out to avoid your everywhere else eyes
But still you howl and growl,
snarl and slither
All to convince yourself of your power
that is as useless as these corpses you’ve carved

Resting in the curve of your cupid’s bow
A lullaby in limbo
The high, like ******, slays
A yellow melancholy daze
Stars that look of bubbles in champagne
Rising, bursting and dying all at once
An idyllic, delirium game
The faraway voice of Kurt Cobain
Your doleful and sulfurous song
Travels on blistered feet
on the backs of motorcycles and mist
through this flickering and tired street

Uttering praises upon your fair skin
Your dark hair hallowed as sacred
These half deserted dawns mean nothing underneath the weight of your alabaster palms and wrists
Looks of a foreign tragedy without translation
You are sacred transparency
An unknowable thing
Just as we are beneath ourselves

I’d crawl inside the breath of you
Drown beneath your milky skin
And entangle my bones with blue veins
If it meant I could exist a second somewhere within you

To encounter you felt like a tragedy
felt like a bewitchment
To know you was luck itself
To love you was a benediction
You were passion, artistry and fire
To everyone but yourself

Blossoms rose beneath twisted limbs
Wrapped around still bones
Still in the encagement of a clock
Shrouded monasteries left stagnant on your dried up lips
As our blood vow lay fallen on this sleeping Earth- that lulled us to sleep with it
What were the words of the sermon that led us barefoot in the night?
That sermon that spilled off the windswept lips of Zephyrus, who carried this light

So late have you fallen under a banished moon
Everlasting we fought the spheres of our own humanity
A thing unachieved so soon
We ran rampant over the Earth's blue daze
and scribbled over the democracy of time
An imposing and commanding craze
that drowns the howling wolves

Gazes at imperfect flesh
Two entities intertwining through a solstice dream
On a perfect night for dreaming
Memorized proportions, freckles and depths once reached
Eyes that knew more of me than myself
But one must wake

It rested at your feet
Covered in sand and salt
Your golden hair strummed your shoulder blades
Created a song for the breeze that passed with it
Eyes deftly searched the shoreline
Measured it a thousand times
and over again
With a sigh and disillusioned swirl
You lamented through the jaded night
Leaving your buried treasure
resting in the wake of the verdict

We found a home in the fortitude of the winter
In the voyage of a nightingale
Benevolence in abomination
and percipience borne of pandemonium
How, then, do we absolve the transgressor?
Remove the stain from white cloth?

We do not

The river wrapped around your ankles
As I willed you to stay
Tilting over the drowsy mountaintops
For just one more winsome glance
You stumbled over canyons, fell over forests
And the river let you be

You began to coil around me by first placing that scarlet flower into my mouth
A renegade chevalier
Unshaken by the trembling of my hands
Eyes closed through the night
You were
even where you were not

A black and blue ***** solitude
that falls off the side of the couch
Stasis evoked by strident abandon
Nightshade drips from your mouth
As you begin to slide and slither down the drain
you imagine a sailboat at night
An insouciance glide atop water
your dilapidated plight

The green shade languidly hung over your shoulder
As I glinted and gleamed my way past
The distant scent of the garden
Melons and magnolias amassed
The locusts sing their summers song
While you take a sip of iced tea
The billowing heat simmers my cheeks
As I wipe the dirt from my knees
I meet your eyes beneath sunglasses
Hold onto your name for good luck
When summer ends, can we still pretend
That were brazen and moonstruck?

As you danced beneath my eyelids
There was kicking within my womb
A silent call that begged to be assumed
You pulled and pushed from here to there

Neither inside of my heart
I bathed and cleansed my soul
Although it tore part from part
Craved within and without
I would enter sleep if I could

A dark and wondrous mourning
That stood silent as the grave
All that was left of you
Pieces of echoed art

I wanted you to tell me about the books you've read
To recite the sentences that made life seem kind
But your words got caught on the sharp mountaintops
And blended in with the snow between your lips

Your name stood thin
Sprawled out in front of me with a bruiseless form
I wanted to reach out and tear at the milky flesh
To find something beneath that resembled home

Once you were as I have said
A lamb that followed the light
You only dreamt of days within your sight
When I see you now, you are battered

Your sagging flesh, sick and dying
A stranger to the world
A world that insists on pushing you out
As it pushed you in

When I think of you
A flash of satin and violet
A lamb underneath the claws of life
And a woman who lost her story

Phases of the clouds
Gently and heavily they pass
With the day in mind
And a breeze at hand
That shatters my heart of glass

The moon looked so cold
It grew quieter and quieter still
And yet I wanted nothing more than to reach out and feel its chill
No disturbances from the light
No face stitched to rock
Only a sliver and a shiver
Circles of glow rung around its neck
And the distant cry of a crow

My footsteps, the only sound within sight
Small travels from there to here
And here to there
That rolls over the other
Stepping through the blizzards and fallen leaves
Which are forgotten until the next
Some listen for the sound
Some litter them across a page
And others rest their feet

I remember you through photographs
Glossy and flammable
One where you’re smelling aster in a field
A dagger through my chest
One where we languidly rest by the waters edge
A reign of desolation
Another your eyes stare from behind the photograph
I want to cradle you through this photograph
Summon you through this photograph
But how can I reach you through paper and ash