Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips,which i have loved,should touch
another’s,and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart,as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know,or such
great writhing words as,uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be,i say if this should be—
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands

I scrap and peel the patchwork of the earth
Half written dreams dust the floor
In the crook of her neck we drown
Secrets eat away the floor
The petal of her taste nips the winter pain
Bird travelers taste the treetops
Torn like a page from the language of your touch
I'd split my bones to place you indside
The day seemed so young as the floors begin to moan
A hummingbird sobbing in the deepness of time
As the night dreams

so it is, so it be.

life granted me a boon, come to me, the honey.

not the merest of coating, but a power enrichened,
capable of driving out the slow acting, daily killing,
poisonous venom.

makeover, coverup of tears of ancient marriage-madness,
black swan hate disguise, her lies, venom injection of
coffee blood staining love pretense, now just scar tracks  for a
new boulevard.

the slow pour,  the golden russian amber intertwined tones,
tongue tasted, inside me now, revealed in slow exiting, beauteous,
mellifluous tears.

you dance with the stars, I watch you watching,
clueless that my thee-flavored tears, dance and pour down
my face.

destitute, nearer my God than thee, god blessed this child's life,
love gifted from sweet bees, late in life, flew from my computer screen and sonnet-stung me with antidotes of
love n' honey...

I've got this idea
Not much more than a feeling, really

There's a kid, sunken into a dark green couch
It's old.
It's been reupholstered more times than anyone cares to remember
But its comfortable, so no one cares
He's hardly moving
Its hard to see what hes thinking, his expression a blank slate
His face is glowing with the rays of the sun, soaking in through a picture window
It paints the wood paneled den with hues of burning orange

The heat kicks in, and warm air creeps out from beneath the floor and swirls above the **** carpet, faded and worn

He  just sits there, staring out the window

Outside, the grass has lost its color and now lays like a blanket over the frozen ground
All along the bases of leafless oak trees and amid their skeletal branches, squirrels roam freely, filling the cooling air with soft chatter

Birds as well, perched amid the darkened branches
Standing, watching the world turn

The shadows create a perfect contrast, growing as the sun sets
Dark fingers that reach out to pull the world into the quiet arms of encroaching night

The wildlife seems unconcerned as they wander aimlessly, sating any curiosity that arises without a care

He wants to join them
He wants to be just as free
But the room is warm
And the couch is soft
So he sits
And watches the world turn

the moon that hides in the dark
accompanied by thousands of stars
an old man with a pack of cigars
laden with scars and craters

always changing but, ever the same
he once said, for you, the moon i'll tame
I once believed that it was a bless
the moon is cursed to light the dark

day or night, it does not matter for him
there is no life on the moon
as I realized there is no life in him
the moonlight is the best thing i had seen


as smoke filled the air and blurred the moon
the rays beamed through it, though soon
zephyrs passed, were cold, and smelled of~
the old man smiled

Sands traverse oceans to envelop me
within the coercion of a dream of Egypt
as I search the turquoise of the medallion in my hands
to match the gray-blue of his eyes.

Too long have I willed for him
to sail the Atlantic,
stride through the door,
and sweep me from haunting this view of London.
But for now I am left
to my own image and a pane,
so I muster the meat of my palm
within this sleeve of lace
to brush it across the glass for a clearer look,
yet my efforts have revealed
no more than engorged eyelids reflected…
manacles of me.

Behest of self,
maniacal I am slated
to perform involuntary tedium,
hopeful to unlock deeper meaning
within each hieroglyph,
once so purposefully etched in a semblance of bronze.

I long to surrender
to the warmth of the taste of iron
caught in his sights over a tomb blanketed in gold.

I will come for you, Daughter of Heaven and Earth.

Spontaneous peristalsis of phrase
connects with the drop
gurgling through the candid quiet
and I wonder
if the image that now reflects would indulge him,
or if he might ****** the lock of dark hair
that he cropped from my neck with the skill of an assassin
when our paths first crossed in Cairo.

Time has softened the image I hold of him;
his eyes are satin,
burning like a flag still waving
as his army advances over our forbidden dig.

There is something
sensation-like in downfall…
copious saline embodies the fractal curve.

I found no scrolls of the Book of the Dead.

Here in my olive skin I rot like a peach
that’s been left in a satchel
forgotten to dust of the ages
disturbed by picks and axes
that strike with the determination of discovery.
A peach, never to be savored;
never to nourish or to pleasure,
or be trampled by insects
and carried off in pieces
to the hollow of the ant queen.

My eyelids are hard to turn like wet pages
forced to envision a river that is not the Nile
where I am held within the binds of propriety,
corsetted, bustled, and locked out of Egypt
dammed from the salvation
of even an intermittent Dutchman’s finger
by dunes and shores and footfalls
to find words that stream in liquid resonance
where firm succumbs to self and
I can feel passion writhing through my intangibles.

Thusly, clouds form over a city that blackens and distorts
the way a river's reflection of my face
would ripple from the plunging body of a dove,
belly-up, encased in wings,
and two thousand miles from him.

Arousal is a moccasin seethed in spasms
of peristalsis and musculature
toward the beckoning pulse of breast.

Any hope for contact collapses into flesh,
venom sheathes each corpuscle,
and a woken neck flails in judgment
before the truth in his eyes
under the shadow of the Great Pyramid
where Ramses II lies supine
across the Turin Papyrus.

I imagine the other side of me
and where she might reflect when
all that there is in such a study
contributes to my wanting
to wreak my bellied freedom
beneath crevices that sink as crevices do
in downward angled layers
to withstand the ages.

Dark hair gleams in contrast,
more for strip of scalp
than the trickle of red down my back.

Breached like sugar that candid—
starburst wings of Monarchs dripping ancient like sunsets
over magenta and milky mauve in the reeds—
my ankles revealed and inverted to the sky they glean, yet...

his arrival is delayed
when the pistol ***** three times.
The still of my breast compounds
with the steady union of the dark, and
somewhere denial flows with the sands.

So cycles change, like a fable for Eternal.

“Daughter of Heaven and Earth,” written by Dionne Charlet, appears in print in Cairo by Gaslight, the second anthology in the By Gaslight Series from New Orleans small press Black Tome Books.  Books in the series include New Orleans by Gaslight (ISBN 9780615801186) and Cairo by Gaslight (ISBN 9781516961528).  Both collections feature poetry by Charlet, under the pseudonym Dionne Cherie. Look for the upcoming anthology Paris by Gaslight, which will feature a poem of the same title by Dionne.

The milk man died last week.  I didn't
know him well, just enough to know his favorite
chew and how much he hated Fritos.

I knew his lover and her worn-out
windbreaker, her frizzled hair as gold
as her Marlboros.  I sold her a pack of silvers

once and she nearly snapped my neck.
They take (took?) their tobacco dead
seriously.  She hasn't come back

to work yet, though her five allotted
days of grief are over.  The empty
milk crates just aren't empty anymore.