Monsters dance
in my shadow,
step by calculated step
as I stumble like a
              half-spent top
                              and wobble in the
                                          splintered grain
of aging wood beneath

I've been spinning for too long and I'm about to topple, but
I don't quite fall
don't quite fall,            
don't quite                                
                fall.

But still behind me, trailing like
the shadows that I drag behind me in the sun,
there's a hounding pack
of demon's spinning with me
on the floor.

Oh deliver from these wretched
sons of hell and God's
great curse.

Come and save.

if one man dies,
that's one too many
when reaping wheat or grain,
but war brings greater goals
to life, and its actors
seek for more
than simply life or death:

honor, glory, strategy,
the safety of the fatherland
- all these are lifted higher than
the value of one life.

barbaric? or enlightened.

one thing's sure:
life's too precious to be spilt
by ordinary means.

pinned down beneath a falling tree?
tragedy.
but if mowed down by cannons
that man is suddenly a hero
fallen and remembered,
given medals and
(too late)
an overflowing cup of praise;

for that man's death was worth it.

so they say.

Perfidy,
traitorous brother of mine
unseen like splinters
and deeper than mines
unloved, unlovely
a speaker of wind
blow on the coals and
destroy every
friend

crashing far below upon
a shore of molten ore,
that symphony of silence
stares and swiftly
takes the gore

laughing gods of
cruel men,
take and leave no rest
for them
to slave for in the night.

Heart's beat fast
like horses
running from a flood,
to lift all other dangers
far above one burning sun.

Agony lives in those souls
with dry and crusted tears,
layered by the thousands
for the simple
earthen spore.

Life or death, it's spreading
and there's nothing left to do,
unseeing eyes have turned away
and listening ears are
through.

Spitting gods of fire,
sparks,
the infinity of war,
simmers slightly, spatters,
roars,
while scented candles bore.

Deeply into nostrils flared
the sacrifice abhorred
by man and all the kindnesses
of aelven daughters
******
to please a god.

This doubting rustic
truth obscures
no dragon fuels his love
for dreams;
but listing warily
that ship's a parchment breaker,
gone
a far, long way from home

Desire, sweet god,
defining every ordnance,
every lyre's sweet undoing
with sicknesses
of the heavy-laden soul:
deep delight in all
forbidden things
well up, and godly grief cannot
unstopper such a harsh
and human
drugging of the mind.

God! Above! You sit,
we sink; you smile,
we wilt, into the cracking
hopelessness of helpless other men.
Devour us all, you light of glory!
Let the fire of your spirit
shine.

Disgruntled murmurs,
death's gaze green
- the envy of his duty
slipped away by soft
divinity.

All wrong, the world creaks
around the miracle imposed
like so many crystal shards
pressed in and yet
not bleeding.

One of us, you say,
He's come and living,
a miracle of flesh and bones
and spirit-filled
desire

No, you lie.
I won't believe such nonsense,
for the aloes are away,
no sweet syrup salve exists
to balm my broken sores.
You lie.

Devils laugh in whispered
shadows,
lurking just behind the mind,
undoing tiny winglets
from the bodies
of God's flies.

Unimagined terror, and the
worst of your bad dreams,
fall like heartless bits of honey
on the putrid flesh of
these...

...these broken children
sitting huddled up,
bitten off on every side
like the cookie crumbles - gently -
when you **** the sweet
insides.

Happy little dancing feet
will never come again,
not now or ever near to me
I'm dragon-born and
thin.

It's my own curse come back,
my sensible defeat,
the folly of a tongue unchained
with hideous things to speak.

Tearing ribbons off my hand,
I reach up for twinkling sky,
for one last breath of sweet
dear light
before the grant to die.

Unknown above, the stars blink out
the universe is winking;
and false-patterned light comes
closer to the wreckage of my
soul.

The eyes of angels glowing,
the scent of suns unseen,
of walking in the forests of the
long-forsaken sheen.
Planets breath their last - expire -
and stars are broken clean,
but still they slip like shadows
towards this darkened piece of
green.

It's all the last things
that long followed,
all the final thoughts unseen,
as the miracle of flesh and bones
is lifted up and freed.

Lift your eyes up to the heavens,
let my goodness filter clean,
open all the cracking corners
of your god-forsaken being
till the end.

Laughter sounds a bell-toll,
listen for the second strike,
yet the hammer never falls
for I have travelled
into night.

Confusion cramps its
elbows in the corner of my
mind
and the god of heaven's thunder
laughs beside him. He is mine.

Cherry-red,
his wounds are flowing freely,
the ****** balm sweeps over me.
I gasp - the burning agony
of every sting revealed.
Blood for blood and
stripes untold,
every fraction that they hold,
weeps into the ravening
of unforgotten, unforgetting

grace.

"If words strung together
across these few lines,
can break through the barrier
of your mind and mine,
then anything,
                     yes, anything
                       can happen with time."

So said the sage, as he
pondered this world.
The nature, effects, and
natural properties,
of this thing and that thing,
and all human faculties.

So learned was he
                               (or so it was said)
that even the ravens
began pecking his head,
for the silver and gleaming
that was locked up and
...dead.

For never, not once,
had he lifted a finger,
to live out the practical
side of his thoughts.

Thinking that sits there
and doesn't once move,
will never affect you
or help you improve:

The sage died a poor man,
no sons came to mourn.
For thought he was smart
no fruit had he borne.

Let this sage be a warning
for you and for me,
not to let thinking
be all that we see,
when we search all around us
for things we should be.

There's something in action
that cannot be faked.
And it's also okay
to make honest mistakes.

The point is, we're trying
to live what we preach:
to let our decisions
be the textbook we teach.

Just look at us
we're perfect strangers,
human and alone
self-containing centers
of our sorrows, joys, and pains.

I walk beside you
humming like a radio wave,
but you are tuned just
differently enough
that all you hear is static.

Just look at me!
A perfect stranger.
Human, meet my gaze,
and tell me that
the magic we are feeling
is contained
in you and me.

How could it be?

Just look at you,
you perfect stranger.
What lies hidden
in those eyes?
What beauty can be
gleaned without
a distillating
word?

Just look.
We're perfect strangers,
all of us; and yet
a current runs between,
and all it takes to show it
is a moment to be seen.

Shared for a moment,
before we pass on.

Treading our own paths;
and humming
to
a universal theme.

In the midwinter of the soul,
all is cold and fruit is
nowhere to be found.
Leaves and blossoms that once
sat spinning light and health
have fallen off and lie there,
broken down below.

The forest floor beneath me,
one time,
was carpeted with remnants
of my last sweet spring
of growth.
Abandoned, all but lost,
and listening,
to a moaning in the wind.

But trees don't die in winter;
nor did I.

Spring crept in slowly, bit by bit,
an undiscovered quickness in the
heart, and hints of breath
so far away, so deep within, that
stirrings heard were no more spent
than darkness closed back in.

But still that gentle pressing in the
heartwood of my soul,
kept on, and stronger day by day
until, with terrifying clarity
the parts of me that died
were seeking fully to control
each waking thought.

In the midwinter of the soul,
the heart is cold, and fruits
that once were juicy lie there
rotting on the ground.
And all seems lost within.

But 'tis not so for me, I know,
for Spring has come again
once more, the sap runs true,
runs through each drooping limb.

Lift up your heads, you forests of
the Lord, bowed down,
surrounded,
cold within.
Let light shine forth within you,
let the woodland fairies swim
through waterfalls of blossoms as they
slip from limb to limb,
delighting in the tearing of the
chaining wounds within.

"Bleed once more," He told me,
"let the terror of your sin,
destroy the cold unfeeling
that has wormed at you - and then

at last,
the living, green delight
will sparkle like the stars of
every clear and silent night."

Bear fruit in keeping with the
cleansing of your soul, for
every tree drinks deeply
of the river's rushing flow;
take confidence, a promised voice to hear:

"Well grown, my tree. My good and
faithful bough."
+
And in the brightness of His
majesty, I will forever
bow.

Colors cascaded around
her smile, laughing like the
first blooms of spring bearing up
under the last ***** blush
of winter's kiss.

I laughed with the colors. Red and
orange and the softest sunset pink - blue
like diamonds from the sky, and green
as thick and billowed as the freshest
prairie wave.

She danced in my heart like a
fairy more happy and pure than
childhood itself.
No sorrow overwhelmed that vision,
though it tainted the edges on every side.
The more I looked the more I could
see their angry boiling, creeping
like the wrinkled edge of a wildfire
dying to infect and purge the light.
But she shone.
Framed by that dark storm
on every side, and scarfed
with a cascade of colors more
brilliant than I knew how to
imagine.

The wheels of her chair spun,
the trembling of her hands flung
a million stars aloft at every quiver.
In the wrinkles of her face
I saw the individual moments of a hundred years
condense,
and a tear fell off her chin
as she looked at me and whispered,
"Look within."

"I am," I said,
and cried myself, the thin
and watery tears of age, long toil,
and unrelenting joy.
Her time had come and
mine had not and yet the
silence of our breathing was
enough to still this final
terrible, beautiful, terrifying storm.

I took her hand and squeezed it
gently, laid it down
on her lap and
whispered in her ear that
hung down low with time,
"Look down on me, when you
are gone.
I follow close behind."