Life is a cycle with a lot of revolving bits and pieces that are always changing in a million different ways; separating and joining. But it’s all a cycle and everything is made of the same stuff with the same energy in life and death.

What if I don’t have any answers?
What if I don’t ever know anything that’s true?
Does that bug you like it bugs me too?

Why am I so tired? My spirit is so low and dies with the trees and I feel the disease of human kind. Not so kind. Staring into the fate of the blind. We’re all so blind. So blind.so blind.

Mudslide muscles
Coax me into the couch
The cloud of distant ache
Coursing rivers in my legs below.

I welcome the pain with warm embrace.

Yesterday
I felt well enough to run.

I am encased in oppressive flesh,
Tissues that restrict my transcendent nature.

If it weren’t for this burdensome cage
I’d evaporate and roll over the city with the clouds.

Fold me like you always have,
Run your nails to set the creases,
Shape me to the form you crave,
Bend me into the art of your wishes,

My form forever yours to toy with,
I conform to your will and desire,
Expose my surfaces, above or beneath,
I will always be there for you to admire,

I can be flexible or I can be stiff,
That depends on what you want,
I am here to help fill your rift,
The one who says you can when you can’t,

Craft that which you seek of me,
I am but your art, your origami.

A darkness crept into my waking crypt,
Its tendrils coiled to grip my tortured throat,
Till retching, retching, gurgled on a rote,
Prostrate, held in its clutches, tightly gripped —
No eye perceived this devil as it slipped
From day to blackened day inside to gloat;
An instrument was I to sound its note,
A plaything used, discarded, broken, stripped —
The world became a window; The outdoors
Turned alien; The beast remained inside,
Content to keep the prison of my mind —
From time to time I dared unto the stores,
        But ever on returning I would find
        The nightmare waiting where we both reside.

I brought her to the water by the moon,
To share with her, the shade beside the sea,
I gave to her my eyes, that she might see,
and sang to her the most afflicted tune.

I prayed of her what she might ever do,
When faced with all the mightiest would fear,
She whispered, through a solitary tear,
A crystal verse to stay her last adieu.

When fires of gold have shed their morning light,
When embers fade and only ash remains,
When enemies of old are at the gates,

Do not embrace the darkness of that night,
Or think upon those ashes with disdain,
For all that might remain will share our fate.

Encased in metal, their bodies careened towards the city. The grinding, the metal on metal screeching, quieted their thoughts.

Head against glass, crowded and foggy, the mother in grey plots her scheme to the nearest bottle of liquor. The man with guilt in his eyes, clutches her hand and wonders when he can get away.

They coast past creeks of muck and cigarette butts. Two bodies on their way to the next hour.

The small girl sleeps on her mothers chest breathing foul ash from the air. Her father smokes with his hand behind a book and exhales sour remorse from his worn lungs.

The mother with heavy eyes, avoids wishful thinking. She has never relied
on luck, so she sits, encased in metal ignoring faces and avoiding eyes.

I don’t know why I keep coming down here
Into the dark abyss of these tunnels.
It’s like something’s calling out to me
Guiding my feet without my permission
Like I’m just along for the ride.

Water drips down from the lower level of the 82nd street station—
Downtown B and C train.
I’m in a cave with dripping stalactites
But instead of awe and wonder
All I’m bracing myself for
Is absolute collapse.

The train roars in
Ba Dum Ba Dum Ba Dum
Slowly making its way to a stop
With a whine of its wheels locking into place
And a screech of the doors opening, protesting all the way.

I know I shouldn’t get inside
Should walk the twenty blocks
In sub-zero temperatures
Where at least the light will shine—
But something beckons me from the darkness.

As the train slowly begins to move
I see the red and blue lights waiting, watching, outside the window
The apparent heterochromia of the monster that lives and breathes and is these tunnels.

I’m suddenly sure that I’ll never return.