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.

I remember your breathtaking portrait.
Your eyes were horizon-blue, awake and ignited in love with a modern man.
In a modern era a love so hot you’re prepared to grieve it 
for the rest of your life
Just to dance in its fire until it fades.
You burst forth and lit the fuse,
Loving hot and working feverishly to emerge and
Forge futures for your daughter and I.
But her father burnt out young,
And his ashes lured her into a shivering, toxic sleep.
In that future she also loved a man she would widow young.

She has felt the cold fire of snow on her face
Passed or thrown out onto the ground
But I can’t tell you if she ever felt that love again.
I won’t tell you about all the cats and dogs she slept with
Or how she threw me and threw at me and all through me
To the sheriffs in a wild state.
Then, with you, she lost love in the last person who loved her.
Her voice cracked and shaded when you couldn’t remember her name.
She drowned both of our spirits and we slept poor, wet, drunk.
These decades have tired her body
And I refused to allow its cold hollow eyes near mine.

Asleep, I consumed myself with the loves of men and the grief for each love.
I ate and breathed men and fever-dreamed through relationships.
I aimed poisoned golden robes at lovers thrown with a motor’s velocity
And then ran loud red lights smoldering through hot teared eyes
With the unsober intention to silence us both in the burning frost of February.
Hate veiled all reason and hystericized my being and thirsted for more:
More prohibited liquor than I could ever nurse it with
More pills than the pock-nosed doctor would give when he
Sliced open the belly of a howling wild animal mother me.
Many more.

And when I died I awoke in ice and raged my way to the surface of the Styx.
It was there I emerged warm and wet next to a modern man who reminds me of you.
I fell and I rose through our molten love and forged myself within it.
We, in a worn and unwealthy future still love and work for our unborn daughters
As hotly in dynamic color as you did in crisp black and white.

Through him and through you I can love her again.
And when our daughter bursts through, undrugged and undoctored,
She will incite her own century’s hot voltaic Spring,
In a pyrotechnic era of alive and alert daughters,
Gaining ground and dimension and speed,
Because she will know our love.
I wish you could see the horizon in your daughter’s eyes
When she sees our yet unconceived apple of discord.
I hope the warmth will awaken her, and she will emerge and forge herself
And know again the good rage of a fiery and awake love
Worth grieving.

Limelit tendrils kiss her face,
A muscular ball gown crowned with a poisonous dew.
Before the light, as a tiny arrowhead in indoor dirt
Acid steeped inside her while she waited for the day and grew.
She waits still for the day when she escapes and exhales 
In a virulent chemical coronation with much ado.
Her green ****** breath will choke your lungs and
Lay waste to all things in a pheremonic haze and glue.
 
Concrete parts for her roots in the noxious shade of a wilted steel jungle
As she scrapes the sky like a biocidal yew.
Useless eyes rotting out of useless skulls,
Pulling species to their knees to subdue.
An orgiastic tundra of moss and skin and fur
Piling like toxic snow on a human avenue.
Cold-skinned vines pulsate toward one another
Humming strangely and whipping through
And ever upward to meet the bright desert light
Beyond her glorious emerald lair of flesh and mildew.

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.

Being made,
When
One ***** of light
Hums through opaque blight
To unite with excitable ground
Reminds me,
How
Creation needs
Destruction to feed
Buried seedlings the freedom to hear
Ground afar
Where
Stars echo home.
A blue catacomb
Sings in ohms, radio moans, being made.

Lipgloss dripping candy lacquer aquamarine
Wrought silk enfolding shadows of her shoulders obscene
Drugstore ribbon laced her feet just as in my dream
She reduces me to liquid in an urban machine
On the asphalt a virile shellac.
 
Power like a thousand ships of industry steel
Columns fall to soldiers at the clack of her heel
Sirens’ polished poisoned fruit that drives one to ****!
A Dahlia's vitality shunted and left to congeal
In that pool, then a wave of relief.

This century spins wilder than prior gyres,
Racing backward, ever more efficient and spectacular,
Study finds.
 
The weather today, like every day, is
Immense and incomprehensible.
 
Election week is soon, and the Salv-nation Party candidate
Would like to remind voters of the Party of the Mysterious Robe's Mysteriousness.
Representatives for the PMR gave no comment.
 
****** digital performer @JezebElsa
Went viral with her leaks. #HollywoodNewz
 
An impressive number of people we know
Demand justice for all registered unrepentant killers.
 
A Meteor landed not ironically atop Selfiecomplishment Summit early this morning,
Injuring only the most dedicated hikers.
Confirming folklore, the Meteor disappeared once photographed.
Don't go out trying to find it.
However, you may still purchase a tincture of the liquid it contained
From us at OrganicH2.Org.Headfeed.com
No meteorologists were harmed.
 
Us vs. Terror: Terrorwatch!:
The Monsters we've been ignoring
Have taken the City and consumed the last of

Drink me:
A shapely shifting goddess for thee.
Nerves dance,
The king is folded - now is your chance.
Take nothing you need. Lend none of your heed to arms with no hands.
 
Mad hounds
Crave and call your heart's ****** pounds.
On beat,
With thin air streaming under your feet.
Your echoing **** rings guilty and gilded ears in the street.
 
Run fast
To warn them that their idol's collapsed.
Gold spills
Deflated gods erupt from the hills.
Rich lava bleeding through but not ceding to men's fragile wills.
 
Ready yourself for controversial glory.
Set free the heavy hearts of those who can't flee
Go write something wrong or heal with a song the eyes that won't see.

From one end of a sea, I waved to you
And carried it with me out to purlieu.
Over desertous thirst. It sank me through
A mermaid's con: rehearsed to drown on cue.
 
It reverbed off radars who threw it off course,
Who clash out; Who say our sound invokes force.
Who translate our call to a crime; (perforce);
Who trained us to fall, then harbor remorse.
 
I wait still in oceans for your wave back.
I wave me free from fear of dinful attack.
I got it all up here, should they lose track.
But I'm anchored still, -- slow, should you wave back.

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.

A star with night between her teeth; a girl
Staggers a dance of seven heels, less six.
Cues strewn along her route: a pin, a pearl,
A tired, ****** queen a-lean on bricks.
 
Though under veil of spotlight she makes sway,
No trace of rule remains on head or feet.
Each sunset swallowed before birthing Day
To toss to sirens feeding in the street.
 
Nocturnal vagrants fever dreaming deep
Her cafe consorts, seeking but a friend.
Mascara floods downstream where ducklings sleep,
So get her to a bed and to an end.
 
And though low trolls will ever tweet her shame
Each morning's jay will always sing her name.

Starve fasces-brandishers who predicate
Authority from appetite to lead.
Uproot the system bred to overfeed
Flush priests of law whose acts emaciate
The restive body of we third estate,
Condemning propaganda of the deed
By terrorists like Johnny Appleseed.
We must invoke our right to eat the state.

Roast those who'd charge an honest cannibal
For planting liberal teachings to displace
The syndicate, and share economy.
Fire up the cult of the imperial
And ration insurrectionary grace
Ample for all to feast on anarchy.

I'm fighting grind-split tooth and peeled nail
Against all my selves I call other.
Veiling mortal wounds with gossamer,
I claim romantic identities
Falsely, with sinister abandon.

Coiling ever inward and away,
I withdraw me from poor reflections;
From glaring eyes betrayed and pooling
Tar melting down from scorched railroad ties
Strewn alongside deserted highways.

I run again home to a cold box:
Fluorescent orange light grating down eyes
To dull accessories, who abet
Escape to asylum in wombing
Safety of echoing monologue.

Reason rides to mind a snake oil savior
To colonize my nobler instincts.
Blood-choked and complacent, I'll deny
My proudest breaths were spent defending
Glass towers of an empty castle.

Rend all your erstwhile double-tongued pharaohs.
Cast out inner sycophantic slaves.  
Lay civil barriers to ruin.
Surrender to grave knowledge of self.

When I am by myself,
Perhaps after a glass of embarrassingly inexpensive wine,
I pick up a volume of verse by a handsome young British man.
My fingers glide over his long breathtaking lines.
His allusions arouse so many ideas in my body until
I feel the need to satisfy my own poetic passion.
I have to get the writing out of me urgently and alone.
I relax as I start to touch my thoughts to paper in rhythm.
Clenching my pen and smacking words together harder and
Faster with my face all contorted,
Culminating in the sublime moment
Where my words and I become one.
Then, afterward, looking upon the inky mess I’ve made,
I feel utterly exhausted and I never want to see the thing again.

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."

The forms of lions reported were false.
It was a body of men with no heads.
They were no one, but everyone was it.
A cannibalistic **** of Self.
Gaping yaws with no faces to give word,
Unable to hear their own glottal calls,
Guttered incoherence for none to see.
Their fire and power were unlike those stored
In our hundred buried years of Mundis.
Unbound viscera – black, boiled, and souring:
Replaceable parts via war and tea;

Served with flesh overdeveloped to taste;
Served to slouching tongues and beastly fingers
By those for whom labor is cause and curse.
Adrenaline and other chemicals
Oiling their blood, charging minds, taxing nerves,
Traumatically driving their will to serve
Their bottom-toothed anathematic maws.
Those best who remained born of conviction
Died with the worst unexceptionally.
We now ask not what is coming for us,
But how long we will allow it to feed.

An irrational animal gets high
From the ravenous pump of its own tongue,
Nursing wounds of a disease untreated.

His fat meat skulks through marbled corridors
Around eyes that assign value to worth,
Fixated on transactions to be paid.

The ring and flash of victory courses
Through his silken veins and opens his mouth
To swallow the pride of the defeated

Reflection in a puddle of his own
Drool, clinging shakily from toothless dogs,
Addicted to the peak and crash of trade.