Most nights the train wails through the countryside,
a lidless cyclops banshee, sightless levin searchlight, and so sonorous the bridge's paint curdles
Grain streams out of cars and clatters among the tracks
Might your midnight snack have jolted free your soul and ferried you through the moonlight?

Morning announces a sunless sky, for you
eyes tenderly shrouded in a heather gauze
She whispers foul incantations across sludge and waterless brambles
- a lullaby to rustle and carry feathers from flightless wings,
to entangle them in the earth's course, tawny hair,
adorned and glittering with glass slivers and hollow bones

mind like a hive
oozing honeycomb thoughts
skull sticky with residue  
the world sleeps but
the darkness hums

sleep arrives slowly ‘neath the moon’s lidless eye
her ceaseless beam an interrogation bulb
questions swarming,
inhaling that honey,
drowning in sap

rearranged days,
circadian rhythm working around to the other side of the clock,
crunching and stretching like a cracking spine

bedsores of the brain
eventually exhaustion feels mundane
undereyes stained, bruised, sallow
limbs caught in the tar
relentlessly gulping, swallowing greedily

too sleep deprived to resist the undertow

I'm glassy, threatening to spill over
busy mourning the sunrises I've missed,
moments I never noticed.
So present below the skin that days skip around me.
Am I sick?
Or is this normal?

Disease of self-awareness
Flies just stick to ****, every flight a quest for a new pile
so filled with purpose, unbothered by their nature
What do dreams mean?
Why do I question them?

The sky threatens deluge, then clears without warning,
dictating my thoughts, my moods, without thought.
Thought is a gift, the gift to muddle the clarity,
to question change without control
There is no motif, no purpose, just wings drumming the cement,
to right oneself after tumbling, to what end?

First fall:
We walk, my left hand twists the frayed strings
with your left in my right, we waltz home
seek warmth resting on bended knees, to get closer
to kiss you
Weakened fabric acquiesces to strain, splitting further
across my knee and we laugh at the sound through each other's lips
and are lost again

Then winter and fingers slip through rips and behind slats
to find even lean protection from the cold
Trapped against my thighs, fingers
right against my thighs, fabric
doesn't stretch so it shreds a little further

Time unravels behind us, behind this moment
unravelled, freed threads to pull and pick at
littering car seats, bed sheets and under my fingernails
we leave behind and weave ahead

So spring though summer and I trim away ribbons of denim
and wear the remainder while sun desiccates our skin
and wears us away invisibly - water through rock
rips and tears us - rapidly we dissolve
so I carry past days with me still.

red presides over pavement
suspending a stream of steel
glinting off fenders, glancing from glass
staining knuckles gripping wheels

some few - the crosswalk's front row
spectators to street walkers
summoned by chance
to an intersection of existences

toddler fingers streak tinted glass
in time to someone's stereo
eye contact in rearview mirrors
and a man steps to the crosswalk

a haggard soul, straining forward  
against a cart of belongings
straining slowly, against this weight
wading, as through water
august air; maybe molasses
while the dammed river hums  
absent eyes await impending green
unsighted onlookers - do you see?

a stranger shouldering three coats
slipping through your midst
stories swirl across his palms then
flutter up like exhaust
fleeting as the yellow

When empty, I was ravenous
and with hunger came drive
frenzy of a starving creature
unquenched, thus alive

Now, hollow with phantom pain
deepest ache, darkest grey
I, a shifting spectre
quite liable to drift away

Sharp pang of need
Serve my deliverance
Slash through the fog
Shatter this reticence

Oh, famine, lust, longing -
to be famished for living!
to be removed from this apathy,
relieved of this malady

Replace hollow with empty
Restore pain, grant clarity

Years that washed over me,

eroded my skin my smile my senses

time reclaims; what was given me - taken

but predestined dissolution feels fair compared

to carnage caused by

You - accomplice to whims of time

lulled me to security by our regularity

then vanished with those parts of me

coaxed from me unwittingly.


At least the years admit their crime.