The shepherds are killing the sheep, right down the street in barrages of automatic weaponry with no screams, just armor and clenched teeth, in the land of the free, home of the brave, decaying dreams, and police raids.

Pull me up
Push me down
Same time
Same place
**** it all any way

From the filth
From the flame
Into the well
Into the shame
**** it all any way

Unchanged
Estranged
Deranged
Profane
**** it all any way

Vacant
Vagrant
Strengthened
Awakened
**** it all any way

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

My love was a fire that burnt the edges of my book, spreading to the binding, then from the inside, the flames licked outwardly toward my breath, filling my lungs until black was all that was left.

Ashes brushed aside. I stood with crusted eyes that questioned the surmise, to my late arrival.

Reprisal programmed in the map of my survival, vital to the plans for standing, and rejecting everything I've known, and i have grown in the pain, that has formed my strange demeanor.

My felonious ways, plead behind misdemeanors, for the leaner sentences of my commitments to commence upon the trenches of sheltered fakes, measured, divided, and placed in places to judge the taste of my waste.

Be my guest.

you swept the ashes of winter
lit red and ****
drawn naked with smoke
and coal
still glowing
in the shadow of paper flowers
pressed to walls of plaster
and stone