i didn't mean to find a flower
on my journey through the forest
but there it was
trying
to bloom in a
crevice of the rock

We're dancing on a
knife's edge,
you and I.
You know it - I can see
the sparkle in your eye.

But do we care? I suppose
there's somewhere deep
down in
where mind sits at its desk
and all the glaring danger signs
flash red.
But on the surface, there's a
bit of gold in knowing
where we stand
for now,
and being free to dance the line
with comfort in your friendship yet
excited
all the same.

We know where we stand:
it's not together,
so we're free to tap the
dance floor lightly
and
smile into the night,
because our words are sparring
in -
well, let's say they
might have crossed the line.

But just our words.
We two?
We're standing side by side
(this side of the line)
and laughing at them,
pointing out the silliness
yet somehow still content
to stay and watch them
anyway
for lingered moments that speak
more deeply
than the words themselves could ever do.

The heavens warred
above us,
for decades at a time:
with blazing lights at midnight,
and
shadows stalking past at noon.

We took shelter in the depths,
left our children in their
graves.
The old and weak among us
fell beneath

the dying
of
the gods.

Towers tall as mountains,
walls once thick and strong,
cities split like gemstones
by the fountains bursting through.

Scorching heat,
flames born of wind,
the air around us burning,
the deepest depths our
only
refuge from the fallen
fusing forms.

Cold, both long and bitter
followed,
all our caverns covered over.
Unceasing was our journey
and to stall was
certain death.

In time the final judgment came,
and heralds marched the skies.
The soft sweet glow of
sunset,
and the trumpet call of
dawn.
Day by day the rivers swelled,
and life crept up again
through white.

The final moment of the battle came,
with the shudder of a curse,
and the body of a demon
flung from God's sweet
afterglow.

His body left a trail of ash
wind found the bits and swept them,
day by day they sifted
ever closer to our earth.
The rest of him, a smoking wreck,
destroyed our tallest mountain,
fire rose from it
for years,
and then settled into smoke.

Until the dragons woke.
Then came the end.

every moment I sit
on the edge
twiddling my thumbs
right next to insanity

tender lies, spoken
in whisper,
root themselves within
and spread moments of weakness
all dolled up as
strength.

I know the thrill
of falling

deeply

into the heart of
abandon,
headfirst, the warm
and gentle darkness
keeping my eyes in place,
fixed upon it:

my broken and perverted
crucifix

many hands stretched out to wound him,
reaching for the God of Souls.

so mine reach out to claim her,
clamoring
for the sweet ungodly savor of my
goddess
and the beggarly delighting
of her tender gaze on me.

perverse pageantry,
the ritual of very God above
imitated in the wasting
of this ******'s
soul.

stretched out for all to see,
just like he.
pierced through and bleeding
from head, heart, hands, and feet -
so she is pierced
for me.

not to save, but to delight.
uplifting?

bringing low
+

blasphemy, you say?
indeed.
of the deepest and the darkest
dye,
conceived in hell, the devil's spawn of this idea
swam upward to life through
layers of molten lies.

they burn, unceasing.

If you could tear one part of you and cast it far away, what ***** would you...

...fool! think not
escape to find without a light
trust not
the fickle heart to leave any part of you to lie severed
in the cold for long.
you'd search for it, and find in reunion cause
for celebration of the
darkest kind.

lay flat instead
upon the sun-pocked surface of this lightless planet
that you call a soul.
lay bare your helplessness
to the falling stars
and take the fatal blow that falls down
from on high.

no life without death,
no freedom without a brand
new set of chains.
do you actually believe it possible to change,
without such bitter pangs?

undo your only hold on life
and in the process gain
a claim to thrones eternal
and the everlasting
flame.
+

shadows of the devil's crucifix are haunting me.
desire, love, and beauty lick their lips
and wait for me.
but shifting like the broken
veil within, the pageantry I see
unfolds,
mist falls away; reality breaks free.

the shattered, broken
body of a god,
hangs limply on a tree.
lightning flashes, and a flood of unrefracted clarity
destroys the feathered patchwork
of my soul.

held aloft before him,
I scream.
forced to watch the devil's prodding,
dancing in their glee

I can never, never be free.
compelled by love more fierce than fire,
inflamed with all the agony of
purifying blood,
I lay a hand upon him,
and I weep like God above.

all this for me;                    
         all this,
                                            for heaven's enemy.

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."

it fades away, but not because it’s gone.
time does not destroy
nor years the pain unmake;
scarred and scarring.

layered pain:
a heart’s a frail and terrible thing.
accumulated horrors
in the attic of the mind
forsaken and forgotten
in light still burn the eye.
time’s circle turned,
by day and night unfurled
does not the bleeding wipe away
but distance adds and
layer stacks on layer.

don’t deny the hollowness
the bleeding in your eyes.
with falt’ring step and screeching voice
it’s gone before a sigh
without a whisper,
clasped in hearts aboil,
hanging, sinking, thoughts uncurled
like bleeding bits of earth.

drown this terror,
dye that gold
don’t deny the doubter’s goals
flying, denying, it’s all the
same to me,
filling up the measure of a broken,
settled gleam.

inching forward, step by step,
we look above for light and hope,
denied this life we drink;
and blight
devours in the night

sanctified by fallen gods,
a dripping-honey angel
stooping, breathing down our necks,
to free our death’s sweet
struggle.

Alone, alas, ‘tis not to be, this dream’s
a fatal liar,
for nothing that we see tonight
will ever meet His fire.

Denied, we died. It’s time to bleed
in fire.
Watch it hiss. We kiss. We fly.
And speak of our desire.

all my sorrows washed away
all my darkness turned to day
every sin and failing weak
every evil word I speak -
He has turned them all to dust
no more dirt and no more rust

blood now boils within my veins
life now covers o'er my stains
God who is the perfect ruler
has stooped to daily be my tutor

What grace! What love! What everlasting light!
What awe! What life! What
ever-growing sight!

if all the lights
and all the shadows
combine to show
the perfect palace
hovering so sweetly
in the air,

is it too much to ask
that somewhere
in the twisting future
you and i can
somehow
make that journey
and meet each other
in that castle in the air

It's as if the world is trying,
cloud by cloud,
to create the fairest fantasies:
A cloud-bank seen in morning adds
an unseen mountain range,
and shadows played on fluffy depths
silhouette a half-imagined grove.

If I seize these dreams and let my heart fly
into these impossible what-ifs,
it seems to me the world's
a far more magical place.

The earth is full of possibles,
I see them all around:
Misty heights appearing
with the coming of a cloud;

in the dancing fire,
there's a world of half-seen dreams,
glowing canyons heated
high and uncontained;

damp sand, dripped, like wax
will build a fairy castle
for the froggies and the flies;

in the wrinked mess of twining roots,
the hollows and the leaves,
a hundred tiny hovels - undiscovered -
with a beauty all their own;

frozen mud, crystal-crusted,
palaces of earth and ice
stretched by nature's freezing *****...
they lay bare beneath our feet if we will
stoop to look so low;

and frosting on the windowpanes,
growing like a portrait of a luscious
2-D land.

They are tiny pocket worlds, all of them,
universe unshared
yet no less fair for the eyes
that do not see.

Beauty unseen is beauty nonetheless.

But how much happier the man who
looks about him for the whisper,
for the quiet, crystal piercing of the light
that shines just barely on the other side
of all that can be seen.

Tiny pocket worlds all, and completely
unexplored.
But you and I can walk there,
if we tend the fairy dream.

I set about to write a sad, sad story,
a tale to tear the hardest hearts of men;
but as I looked about for inspiration -
reaching here, prying there,
and rummaging through
all the wrinkled sorrows that have been -
I saw here and there a twinkle
throwing back my candle's light.

At first I wondered at this
and wandered toward those stars,
for what did light refracted have to tell
about our scars?
But as I bent to listen to the whispers of that dream,
I saw my dim reflection in a
shattered glassy gleam.

Mirror broken on the floor,
am I truly the most sorrowful
of all?

no heart can flutter all alone,
nor devils fly in space,
for all the travels of our minds,
are blazing with a trace

no farther dragon's head will fall
beyond the wing of night,
for someone somewhere knows
the light
and fills it with her song

before, before, those blessed words,
it's all the last of all,
for something burns me deep inside
with fire and glowing coal

forged in brilliant heat we sing,
left to die in fire
but no one knows the things we've seen
nor felt the dark desire

"forever and forever"
says the wingless watching eye
and tomorrow will be sooner
than the dying of today

death stretched out like nobody's business
lost in flickering light
dust to dust and ashes to ashes
before the falling of night

"don't go away" she said with a smile
"don't let the light die in me"
and she took me and melted each strand of desire
and left me empty of me

+
formless fury, bleeding pain
don't awake this dragon's bane

dragons and goblins
elves and men
stories that are woven from now
until then

guttering, sputtering
the howling of winds
everyone talks of that dream
the night bends

simplicity dwells in the
smallest of things
when shadow and silence
true finity brings

all up in the air
all fallen below
each whisper of heartache
is death without blow

the ravings of a madman can
sometimes come nearer to the truth
than the deepest philosophy.
for any hand that wields
a pen
is powerful in its own right.
and sometimes it is better to leave
our thoughts as they fall,
disordered and in chaos,
than to gather them together
pretending that they are wise.

They thought well of me.

memories, like ashes flung
across the web of time -
are half-burnt logs where dreams still
sputter;

and I bid them all goodbye

no one knows the sorrows,
nor the joys of light unseen,
when stirring through the ashes
of yesterday's dreams

farther than an ocean spread
the eagle eye has seen,
but never can the keenest
pierce that gray and ashy sheen

the past is gone - a mirror
of our present selves, I think -
the things we see there
gratify the darlings and the beasts
+
memory, like ashes flung
across the net of time -
are proof that life one time
was lived:
that fevered dream of mine

now dead                      

below the surface,
where the dust is soft and blows
in the gentle gentle breeze;
below the hardened crust of teardrops
raining down down
through the trees:

there the shifting ashes lie;
the happiness of dreams,
the lifting light of love's delight,
the lightning at the seams

and there I roam,
a lost forlorn,
a citizen of dreams
that long ago have burnt to ash
and scattered all my things
+
memory, like ashes flung,
across this web of mine,
with shadows in the corner comes
and wakes the dragon Time

each forward step                          
              a drop of fuel
                 each hour
a log of pine

and always always flickering
that fire we all call mine

till memories, like ashes flung,
across the wrinkled line,
fill up the span my steps have spun
and dry the noonday sun

+

and I stirred the fire to flame again
and thought of her no more

the things I'm most ashamed of
stick the clearest in my mind

i don't want to remember
i don't want to think
there is something inside me that
just wants to sink

i don't want to face it
i'd rather dream on
but i know that i can't if i want to
move on

but that's the question

do i even want to?

one thing i'm learning
...
there's a world of difference
between need and want