To strangers
He’s honesty
To friends
He vaunts
Gliding with speech of bawdry
Making brand new old haunts
And she’s the trickster
Sleight of hand on herself
Making everyone her best friend
Leaving room for no one else
It’s a habit, a curse
Which sunk deep early on
A sultry cadence, with hushed lips,
Most still sing along.
And to this moment, and many thereafter,
The song is less song
Like breathing but apter
No longer putting on airs
I watch and I listen
To a gaunt anemia
Passing on my tongue
To the liars
Whom I know I’ve stung.
See how fiercely engaged
They are in their tricks
Yet condemning those abreast
As “lying *****.”
I watch like birds
They hum, the tweet
When falling from their hands
All those loose leaves
And quills at the ready
Their account of their lives
Too boring by action
Behind those marbled busts
And epochal fictions
Lies the rest of a person
Who is still languishing but
Singing along

Broken loose and freed from a tiring hand
One who, in restful dark, withheld just that,
And left me to wander
To trace forms in the dark
Where troubles and trifles and plain existence
Creep and whisper their damning allure.
How prone am I, at this fatal hour,
To marching idlely backwards through
A blackened torpor
And letting exhausted candles
The haunts that hold, illume the endless halls
That each corner and door
Some revealed appalls.
Drown their debauch which sensually fawn
Out in the words of Byron’s Don Juan
And still feel their tempts, by some form of folly,
That compel me to a world of licentious melancholy.
Looking back to my bed, growing all the number
Cursing the forces which denied me my slumber
And what I saw in rich, encroaching beryl
Reconciled the dreams bereft of me:
An air of such fancy, a more permanent scene.
A smell like the snow to the darkness betrothed
Harkened me hence to a frosted window pane
And out it I saw an occasion so mundane
But at his hour, this light, the glittering flakes effervesce,
I thought I a soul gone from this place
And sublimed to a world
Which cannot harbor, nor ever know, hate.
The sky was so pale which, blithe did it shed,
So many crystalline wonders falling from space
And resting with ease and settling right into place
At that I saw the immaculate ground
Uniform, sanctified, untrodden upon,
With such power as to ward away any notions of destiny,
And purgation of all that could darken the mood.
Each lambent flake a seed sprouted
‘till the lawn was full of snowy trees,
The boughs which bloomed like a placid freeze
Themselves wearing white and all encrusted with ice
Like holy men inept to the notion of vice,
Reached high to the Heaven,
That which I doubt,
To catch alms on their fingers and Gloria shout.
Miles off I hear permeating through the calm
Respire as I arrest,
Synchronized, with time, the lungs of the world
Until my being, minutiae, was that of the whole
And the heart of beauty, a natural heart,
Beat, my confederate,
In league with my own.
In the colors of preternature, picturesque they played
That even in my worst of lows,
My heart at that placed stayed.
The azure raiment bleached at the wakened hour
And my eyes could not help but look away
Blinded by some intense light
In darkness they reflect on the previous sight
And rapture still comes in recollection
How dull were the visions before me lain
Their memorial no substitute, all artifice and plain
Petty entreaties, my pinings for that place again
Though destruction of halcyon I durst not entertain.
Even in depression, it wiles ******
And at times is seizure upon me lengthy, despotic
I’ve something, a snapshot, a little dab of paint
Which even my horrors cannot fully taint
I’ll think back, I’ll go back to that very place
Which I did not wholly leave:
A place of pure bliss
Where I cannot grieve.

Piercing winds, fast and with malice
Whisk away, playfully, the revolutions,
The songs and smoky thoughts
Which I saw smoldering right in front of me,
I see them rising in the night
At the ceiling
In dull streetlight
Mere abstractions, soft and white,
But roar the horn
Of guilty pasts
To their image the smoke holds fast
What soured scorn and blackened mien
Reject my constant repentant whine
And I travail, until I sleep
Their jeers and anger
I choose to keep.
And worthy, still I lay in bed
To even look into a dome ahead
Finite, bleak, and hopeless that
I find only appropriate.
And so close,
I grasp its bars
And wince ghosts whip and slash
At my wrists which I hold out
And tell them “harder” ‘tween teeth gnashed.
The day light comes,
And illumes my worth
By my feet spelled out in the dirt
And just and fair, to dirt I pair
That’s why my eyes
Are fixed there
All I gaze on, vibrance to ashen waste  
Ask the smoke
The he and she, I corrupted chaste.
So my neck can take nine tails
My head is bowed in penitence
Yet, there is no flogger
But my own guilt,
My crimes, like flowers,
From proper minds wilt.
I’ll keep these eyes downcast,
Where they belong
And move without progression
For I’ve done wrong
And with the ground I stay
To payback what debts that vanish
To pay them everyday.

A sickness, the fear
And trembling on my lips
A bearing now oh, so baffling
All these maladies seem to be wearing
Still I hear,
To abate my scaring
Wind chimes chiming
And children laughing.

A man I knew once
Of nobility and pitiless prose
Forked tongue, a mind who blunted those of ferrous wits
A soul nurtured by the forest ewe
Adverting stimuli, in solemnity he sits
A flicker of passion in his throat arose
Promptly licked by that silent promise
Condemned to obscurity, like firm soil he is composed
Ardent and sullen like any cracked timber,
He remains fixed, as the dead in peaceful slumber.
All and none, brothers of the pupil akin
The zenith of event, he has already been there
Visions of splendor, grandiose pulchritude, and ruin
Of his that mine eyes seek do not they dare
Of mine his eyes have never been so cursed
Blank but fruitful what glory he has seen
Of things beyond all mortal belief is he so well versed
Encased in lye and pewter flesh,
No hands were laid upon that sconce
Preserved in ****** garment, immune to life’s thresh
Did not he ignore a man, but rather lack response?
Him lacking had no name, but the case of which him befell
I called, ‘tis true, beckoned him here
And not a nod in my direction
Yet to beseech a brook at the chine of a knell
A thoughtless benediction
But deluded I, spent drunk immersion in this life
Drowned by rushing torrents and temporal maelstrom
A reward of prolix strife
My thoughts composed of endless lies, theories
Countless deeds of fitful right and wrong
Yet he, so pure, have thought nothing like myself
No speech to taint his canvas
Nay, he’s different, of this I’m sure
He’s not diseased, he’s not impure
For it is I, of adamant ardour,
Who should seek his mindful cure.

Has one ever known
The therapy of cutting fruit?
To pare a pear
Its skin left bare
And cleaned of its coarse green suit?
Underneath
The white meat
With knife parts so easily
That, in my grief
Blade unsheathed
Slice here and here and here.
Sweet relief! The nectars pour
In the sink and on the floor,
Its ****** sheen
--The loveliest I’ve seen!—
So I cut more and more.
I’ll cut the fruit, just like I said
One can't **** what's already dead.

Death would not deign to visit me
Not with salute or fatal formality
I’ve written letters, invitations to dine
Perhaps to dance after some wine.
He has yet to entreat a call
I fear he may not come at all.
Given credit, I’m one apt to hide,
I do not tread were he abides.
Occasionally,
He responds to me
In manners and way
Peculiar for this time of day
With presage cryptic, but meaning well
That I cannot hear a personal bell
Like that of towers
When it tolls between the hours,
That his design
(this life of mine)
Will come a calm, inaudible chime
But only in my due time.
Until he comes, for him I suffer
From his disappointments I may grow tougher.
That, my friend, the worst of hells
And it seems Death, from what I tell,
Is doing his job and doing it well.