I'm here once more, but then again when was I not?

as if my eyes have ever shifted from my reflection. I'm sick of it.

I don't know how long I've been here; this dimly lit trap gives away no time.

all else melts around me, pools into ripples of my distorted reality.

I sit and I watch my face. I long for the familiarity of yesteryears that I cannot trace.

my skin yawns open, wills to consume itself - porous, velutinous, and brittle.

this is who I am, this is what I see:

tyrian purple flesh decomposing, falling inside my bones that split and splinter;

my mind climbing out of my head, fugitive from the skull's prison;

breaths, ribbons of grotesque, not deep enough to last and not shallow enough to be numbered.

everything without is human (decaying though it is), and everything within is dissimulation.

this molten, fragmented un-being doesn't escape my sight. these eyes have cried out for respite -

and yet they exist, the odd and sole constant in the mirror before them -

wistful for oblivion and feasting on fear. what's gone has kept me alive for longer than it appears.

this body doesn't even feel real. my fingertips burn at every touch.

what more shrapnel does this heart desire until it plays out its final beat?

got into my seat, took on the highs and lows

the same way that we all go

scooting over for whoever joined the ride

(and the ride was better with you by my side

we climbed up into the sky and the stars

me with my words and you with your guitar

the descend seemed to last forever, although

when we went back down, we found it was never so

you stopped the wheel, got down, and it never started again)

waiting for the motions to bring the night to an end

going to take all the highs and lows as I go

(looking for an answer to a question you’ve always known)

when time starts to spin (when you can also see the light

will I shift when, once more, I find you by my side?)

moribund,

I’m just like what one of the Bronte’s said –

'down to that tomb already more than mine!'

but it’s you on the trolley, the metal just as cold as your skin.

how close were we to this end

and for how long did we walk this wire?

lost and deserted each, neither better than the other.

how long did we swear by denouement

before you gave in and claimed it as your own?

I was and will always be light years, light years away from you.

now I tie your toes together, no ghost could compare with the haunting

of you and your memory:

stains of summer and bruises of promises

in a bed still half empty –

half yours, half mine,

and your half is now missing.

the shoulders are the dampest,

soaked with exchanged comfort and bittersweet grief.

amidst the mourning there’s always the systematical process of the farewell –

the only way to guide us to the true end.



we do it with fire

to purify, to cleanse, to return to dust.



we kindle affections, relations, intentions,

and nurture a flame that always grows out of control,

leaving loss and lament to burn our hearts.



condolences blur into a soft hum,

nothing unites us in our differences but

sometimes it only takes the pathos of cremation to realize that

ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

since I only ever saw fish being sold

on planks covered with tarp or on ice beds in fancy stores,

I only found sorrow in the purchase of their deaths.

how we use one life to sustain another,

breeding and farming existences only for slaughter.

I go back to one memory, one that I observe in every light:

a glass tank on a slab of dark marble,

half full of salty water and crowded with salmon,

and the rising panic as they darted in their prison

as one man scooped out one mug full of water after another

and drained it on the sidewalk.

something so profoundly helpless and sadistic in that action:

the life force of a being discarded like garbage

right in front of their eyes.

their kin, laid out right beside them,

tarp on plank on bricks and stones,

slits in their flesh to increase the appeal

of what their bodies had to offer.

how much like life was that one memory –

moment after precious moment

taken away by people, disposed of by time,

until we lie, facing up, eyes swimming in their sockets

as our last breath leaves our corpse.

I once dreamt that there were nails in my forearms,

from the soft inside of my elbow to the thin skin around my wrist,

and someone pulled them out one by one.

my blood was deep crimson and thicker than honey, but there was no pain.

I wonder if I’m really living when I’m not enduring excessive hurt;

I wonder at how so many lights don’t seem to lift the blackness.

beckoned by fire and sadness,

even Syl broke trying to be her own. how can I make it?

it gets difficult exactly when it needs to be easier.

more dissatisfied with the silence than I’ve ever been before

but the words I say don’t rustle the quiet either.

I know my epitaph would read:

“I was nothing more than this.”

I even know exactly what my hell would look like,

a brimful and just a little more, sensory rapture of the silliest kind.

why don’t I change? why is the same sky above me and the same gloom in my throat?

there’s so much I wish I was but will never be.

only I remain, always –

an outcome unpleasant and undesired, but the only outcome that has ever been.

only I remain.