Unfounded urgency draws
Us out and toward impaling claws.
Body fails on desert shore
Where charging fog unravels with no sea to ride.
 
We cannot imagine coast
Tearing through our raging ghost.
Nor can we remember or
Forget this comfort of eternal attrition
 
Reaching skyward ever, more,
With all earth’s heave behind our roar.
The bleak sunlight quiets most;
Drained survivors drawn back toward retreating silence.
 
From out here. Quiet yet reserving might
For each war against shadow-giving light.
And each dark day we still reach for the moon
As persistently as in illumed night.

Love is Brutal.
Jealous eyes and gasping heart
anticipate downfall to start
backing out now would be smart;
avoid impending pain.

Love is Futile.
oversold and overrated
embers destined to go faded
ecstacy is surely fated
to become disdain.

Love Proves Fatal.
short of breath, I can't stop bleeding
what once was yours, no longer beating
life is flickering and fleeting
down the bathtub drain.


Red is-
-Valentines and fire trucks; sunsets and war,
both sides of this razor and both people in this mirror.

-Roses and romance; my lips and my hair,
and my unhealed wounds inspired by and forever reminding me of
the intimacy that will never be. Again.

-Passion and ******; beauty and death,
and pain that surpasses the simple capacity of the nerve endings
in my tangible flesh.

-Love and hate.
The love I need from you, and the hate I reserve for myself, and all the blurred and liquid emotions that drip so delicately from Inside.

And the Lust I can't resist
And the regret that will persist
No matter how much thick, beautiful color
I wash over my wrist.


Autopsy

"This one is an interesting case," I addressed the group
As you see in the slide, she looks normal outside
But when the procedure got under way, we realized
Her affliction was unique.

We made the cranial incision, and pulled apart the skull.
We then noticed that the brain had been eaten away
By some degenerative disease.
It had devoured all but the brain stem, and looked as though
It had tortured her for years.
"It must have been terrible," one colleague observed, "having your mind
Rotting away every day from corroding memories and false hope."
"Yes," I confirmed, "this could be our cause of death."

Curiouser still, upon separating the ribs, we discovered that her chest cavity
Was lined with some sort of Tar-like Substance,
Mostly surrounding the Heart.
It was thick, cold, and black and it stuck to our gloves.
"It must have hurt." a doctor stated. "It looks as though she tried to scrape it off
With razorblades, or dissolve it with smiles or Love,
But it kept growing back."
"Yes," I concurred, "this is what might have killed her."

The strangest of all was found as we continued the Y downward.
Upon opening the abdomen, we were astonished to see that there was
Nothing inside.
She was completely empty.
Not a stomach, Kidney, spleen, friend, Soul or dream was found in that cavern
"It must have been hard," he whispered, "trying to go on when you're so empty inside."
"Yes," I said, "perhaps this is what made her die."

"And so," I told the students, "with all of her amassed ailments, I decided Jane Doe C33's
COD to be listed Unknown. We aren't quite sure what happened to her, or when it was contracted. All we know is that something awful usurped this girl's mind and body,
Taking from her until there was nothing left to hurt,
And she died."
"So log this one away in your notes, in the event this becomes an epidemic.
An interesting one, indeed …Now, on to the next case for study."

James, you make my eyebrows feel so heavy.
To think: if I never find the one and one make too many empty glasses were broken in the mud-
dled my words when she asked for the time for bed –
All during my morning constitutional.
Take your ***** on the Mount and your Sin of the Farter
Because I know there’s nothing behind the artist except falling towers and furniture-sellers.
But can the deaf still listen?
Or should I care what’s inside a box I can never open?
And how many carriages will follow my coffin
And who will be my wormeaten neighbors
And which tongue will be employed to engrave the epitaph
And topped by what symbol or none?
 
In the beginning the first two words began to breed
And each generation issued reduplication
Evolving vestigial verbiage and new punctuation
All the way down to a young Poet-Hero-Creator:
Use illusory contours to paint the gravity between heavenly bodies, and use
The shared human experience of multistable perception to imply the gestalt of Dublin
(and be sure to use that German term).
We are the artificers of meaning.
 
Item: the location of the key.
Cat: things I should be thinking about but am not.
Item: the *** organs of strangers and acquaintances.
Category: things I should not be thinking about but am.
Item: the autobiographical component of Shakespeare’s later works.
Cat: things I need you to know that I think about.
Item: the possibility that my presence is not nearly as commanding as I’d formerly assumed.
Item: the increasing inebriatory similarities between myself and my father.
Item: the fear of losing my memory of Mother’s face,
as directly correlated to the expanding passage of time.
Cat: things I need you to think I don’t think about, at all.
 
Picture a symphony.
Hold the moment when the lights first fall and the cacophony of tuning
Floods into a single, synthesized vibrating tone. After the silence and before the song.
Write what you hear.
Write the chords in semiotic rhyme; transcribe harmony as memory:
Sing lived and unlived love and stride through on inkblot feet.
Now add the missing notes.

Now as you stand in armor chivalrous
And win by arms this castle all for us,

It feels as though I’ve kissed your lips before
And lost you to some other timeless war.

So when red peril spawns itself anew,
I know you’ll save me like you always do.

Our future vows wrap me in memory,
Embraced by souls and your eyes seamlessly.

Though still our fires flash and turn to shade,
And from our hearts eternity will fade,

Our ashes skim the pool of everywhen
To build the stars until we love again.

They only use Latin to scribe what is true,
Every thought that they thought was an epic breakthrough.
Unravel the universe and earn a statue!
(They question their gods and so do you)
But they know more about reality than you.
 
Some bearded Romantics held meetings (sans you)
To compete so politely for highest IQ.
They poured out their hearts and they thought that was new.
(They want revolution the same as you)
But they know more about fighting the system than you.
 
They recite their own words in an unknown venue,
They sunglass their eyes and dress in bleak hue,
They do all the drugs that the world has to do.
(They smoke and want peace and you do too)
Yet they know more about levels of consciousness than you.
 
In thousands of years, there emerged just a few,
Good enough to be published in a book of who’s who,
They died for their art, or a cause, or virtue.
(At least that’s what’s written, it could be untrue)
Still, they know more about everything than you.
 
What makes you think you can borrow their pen?
You’re alive and well, and Now is not Then.
You’ve not been to war; you have rights like the men.
Apply once you’re dead and we’ll let you know then.

I come upon a dead butterfly in the parking lot.
The blackest asphalt sets off the shimmering seafoam scales of his one remaining wing:
A wedge of Luna and lime
against a tarmac night sky.
I wonder where the other wing is,
And when he lost it.
It might have cracked off and blown away
long after he was dead,
Like a sheet of snowflakes.
But he probably lost it while he was still living,
Hit by a car or an ignorant wayward step,
Left to flutter and stumble to his demise
Like a wounded soldier or a choking fish;
A cerulean one-winged sailboat
Overturned on the vast black pavement.