Off to sleep,
To play among the stars.
For there is work to be done
Within paradise.

Tumultuous blue,
Damning heaven high above.
God’s land is here
And I walk on the face of the great unknown.

A breathing sea,
A girl in the clouds.
Fishing for me,
While eating the stars of yesterday.

Palpitations that strike eardrums,
In and then out;
Rise and fall,
Until the ground has been consumed by mother sea.

Tangy juice,
A dance upon my tongue.
Causes me to fall into the milky way’s arms
And sink below its depths.

A joy long forgotten,
But inhaled in the taste of jasmine.
Hammer and nail,
Strike against each other once more.

Home is now a place far away;
A sea between her and I.
But fret no more, clementine of gold.
Blink away the salt and drink the sweet nectar.

what a dreary blank expression
she carries on her pretty face.
as the breeze kisses her neck
slightly more than she’d like
she feels cold.
it’s time to go inside.
but before any motivation to get up
reaches her apathetic mind
she sits there, cold
and thinks, nothing

Paralell universe
Ransom note
Bluegrass makes me cry when its slow
I think about Pittsburgh and your apartment
The corner bar
Down the street where we leaned on the stone
Terribly drunk
Love sick
I touched your cheek
Your soft hair twisted in my fingers
The day you packed your case
Slamming it on the bed
Your face red and full of tears
And I couldn't drink enough
And I couldn't stop the train wreck
I turned to stone there sitting on the edge
Of |our| bed
I ****** everything with a pulse to get your taste off my tongue
But it lingered on the sheets and |your| pillow
The sheets once blessed by your silken hips
Love can ****, but I think cheap ***** will beat her to it

Daniel?

A piggish snort. Crusted eyes crack open like the wings of a beetle. Ragged nails scrape against the red-worn desert of an adolescent jawbone. A fishlipped yawn.

Ugh. What?

What did you call that plant thing again?

Jesus, James. Waxwood. It's a reddish bark. Oozes this cloudy stuff if you crush it.

Oh. Yeah, of course. Sorry.

Ambient silence. Raindrops fill with rotting organic sediment and fall into the leaves around the
clapboard tollbooth. A zealous fist of ivy tightens its tattered fingers across rheumatic windowpanes.

Dan?

Mm?

Why don't you like to talk about Clifftown?

Ambient silence. Raindrops. Ivy.

I’ll tell you why I don’t like to talk about Clifftown.

Go on.

Sigh.

I was born there. Before all this happened, it was this small village where onions grew. Not many people lived there. There was... Christ. A church, a chemist, a library and a few houses. The biggest house was this tall yellow clapboard place, which was on the cliff by the sea. This kid who lived there. He wasn’t -

A thud as a gesticulating knuckle rasps against splintered pine.

-Ow, **** - didn’t look human. His head was big and soft like a berry, and his eyes were wide and wet and creepy, and he never spoke. It was like he was empty.

What’d you say his name was again?

Never did.

A dusty rubbing noise as the fluid is forced out of a cheekbone.

Leviticus Croker. He died when he fell from a low salt cliff into the sea or something. Can’t remember.

****. I’m sorry.

Don’t be. I hated him.

A lump of pressed asphalt sends a clouded multitude of motes spinning and passes screaming through the glass pane of the sunwards window. A chuckle.

That was a year ago. They had to blame somebody.

Oh. Right.

An eyelid raised in revelation traps a mote against the skin stretched taut across a young skull.

Right. ****.

Whispers of clouds brought to life
From a child's observant hand,
Tied firmly with twine
To mine
Are puddles now,
Unfathomably deep and yet
Impenetrable,
As a windowpane in a lamplit room facing the glossy
Liquid tar of the night,

And sometimes I see the sky
And sometimes I believe I can see the bottom
And sometimes I see my own face staring back up at me,
Tinted grey,
Wrinkled by age or the tiny footsteps of waterbugs
That have found solace in the stagnant water,
And my eyes are glassy and unfocused
And my nose is crooked,
And I am tempted to take a tiny cup
And drink from that tepid pool
Dip by dip
Until the water has drained
And the bottom is no longer an elusive phantom
Masked by a pallid imitation
Of the life that breathes before it,
And the waterbugs and their skittering legs
Are all inside me
Where they bounce around in my warm skin
So I,
Too,
May remember how it feels to be alive,
But the dirt under my fingernails
And the husks peeling from my shoulders
And the tendril roots anchoring downward from my toes
Craft,
In their chthonic shelter -
A suffocating darkness of soil
That strips the eyes and lungs of their familiar needs -
Some lyric
That sings of a new desire
And an emanating warmth that reprimands my very body
For being so naïve,
To think that it
May whither away
Should the sun set on one Summer day's
Dusky glow
(So reminiscent of the afternoons
Where you would grip my fingers and guide me through
The ins and outs
Of ravenous caterpillar holes
Bitten into the leaves
Of the alder trees,
Never allowing me to forget
How you despised their aberrant bodies,
"Freaks of the natural world,"
And I would tell
To closed-off ears
Stories of transformation
And the butterfly that fed
On the ugliness of a fat insect
And turned it into romance)
So I abstain
From my brackish libation
And sit back,
With my dusty hand,
Burnt from the grip of the string,
Pressed to my parched throat,
My stale reflection retreating over the edge
Of the pond,
And,
From my new perch,
See,
The sliver of the Moon,
In her own reflection,
A promise,
Of the Sun that approaches on his handsome chariot,
And wait,
For the return of day
And,
A new face
To wash
Ashore in the tide.