Birds with clipped wings outline her eyes
Her eye shadow is her divine disguise,
That hides the tears that overflow
They pitter-patter on her chest, as her heartbeat slows
Into silence; the violence of her red wine dress
A good merlot, alcohol makes her depressed.

To see her blurred mind in its state of undress
Is to watch genius itself infinitely regress
To the point of pictures that adorn cave walls.
She sees the light flicker in the hall
As synapses lapse and lost are the words
They’ve all gone rotten, solidified into curds.
Exhaustion provides a high in her mind
Though most of her thoughts are quite unkind.

She knows the danger of the man who enchants
Her, and makes her body obediently dance
To a greater demon, with his demonic hymn
He weakens her conscience, makes her integrity dim.

She pursues dusk at a New Orleans café
Surviving on French roast, and warm beignets
A stranger sweeps through the foggy air
Running his fingers through her brittle hair,
Devilishly trying to steal her resolve
Till her past is lost and her future’s dissolved
Like salt into a saturated ocean
Where despair is defined by a lack of motion.
Her notion of life is just the beauty of its rhythm
Its color diffracted by poetry’s prism;
Her head is filled with her loves and lusts
That killed her heart with a thousand cuts
To end the war before it could start
Her captain sailed her home with his outdated charts.

Cigarette butts are put out on her tongue
The smoke and ash remind her of when she was young,
How tobacco evaporates as cigarettes burn
And how pain is love’s method for making us learn,
The lesson of despair contained in every regret,
Best learned when she lets her feet get wet.
Her epiphanies’ are dormant in her single-minded brain
Footsteps catching echoes of the departed train
Leaving the station for some stable place
The mountains and sun conjoined at her face,
A pas de deux she devised at Swan Lake
A heavenly intervention done for God’s sake.

Her mind is warped and can’t recognize
That the warm promise contains the largest of lies.

Fluorescent lights destroyed her poet’s vision,
She recovered her strength at the holy mission
Only to give in and be hypnotized,
By the greatness that the priests prophesized.

The words seem clumsy in the day’s rough light
Their power comes from the isolation of her nights
To go under and not once come up for air
If she dies she’ll realize she has no heir
To look after her fortune of memories and tissues
When her heart shuts down from years of disuse
Because she put up bricks to keep heartbreak at bay
But it ended up keeping those she cares about away.

She’s losing the invincibility that comes with her age
Sacrificing her thoughts for what gets on the page;
But is it worth it in the end? She really hopes so
Otherwise her disguise will fly off when the wind blows
Too hard and fast for her suffering mind
She feels her body getting closer to death all the time.

She prays for a friend, so not to spend her nights alone crying
Indulging in self-loathing and truly despising
Herself. Her tears fall and splatter
Meanwhile her heart’s aching; it’s in tatters,
She puts on a smile to show nothing’s the matter
And hopes that next time it’ll be her heartache that’s shattered.