Her blank canvas
Empty, but promising
To become something good

But her masterpiece took an evil turn

She used only one tool
Strokes of only deep reds
Letting the paint drop to the floor
Where it would then stain

She hid her canvas
Until the deep reds had faded to pinks and purples

Then she unveiled it to the world

It wasn't a masterpiece.
It wasn't a piece of art.
It wasn't beautiful.

It was ugly.
It was disgusting.
It was horrific.

No one liked it.
Except for her.
So she decided to continue filling the canvas

This time experimenting
Different tools
Yet still the only color she used was red

She went days
Weeks
Months
Years
Adding to her canvas
Until one day

She couldn't

Her canvas no longer meant anything to her

So instead, she burned it

blind and black andromeda drops her skirt
and
around her waist she drapes the coldest dirt
when the pink pearl parade is nearing
don't ask, for long forgotten what was told her
monarch and viceroy we age (but don't get any older)
2 dark lovers sleeping in a midnight clearing

overland their dreams they glide of a lower shaded tint
darkness over top of light white chocolate eggs and mint
linen kitten sheets under branches lined of frost
the surface tower rises by a shower sky of cream
silhouetted hours joined discreetly at the seam
riding overnight trains so as not to wake the lost

the cauldron of a moment seen after a lifetime's purge
parallel hips that light a smile never to converge
"she smells like nina simone with a humid voice like ether
pastel lips, renaissance legs and august sunset *******..."
a second to align our love before the blackened water crests
nobody, nobody, nobody knows the depths that lie beneath her

this fairground love ends in blessed rapture flame
the terminal separation that God has given name
of a strawberry village girl isolated and honey tressed
whose severed fingers have guided paths anew
when she could have left she decided not to
but bound her deserter's hands behind love's holy breast

now the violet sands cover our tracks then shift
returning to a landscape's nightly spiral drift
that was the night everything changed
the hunted left the hunting grounds
the silence longed to find a sound
the equinox flowers lay rearranged

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

1680

Sometimes with the Heart
Seldom with the Soul
Scarcer once with the Might
Few—love at all.

Said the king to the colonel,
'The complaints are eternal,
That you Irish give more trouble
Than any other corps.'

Said the colonel to the king,
'This complaint is no new thing,
For your foemen, sire,
have made it A hundred times before.'