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I am a monster of my own creation, yet
Unnamed.
I'm the doctor and the beast he wrought.
My face is wan, and eyes sunken; Strong and capable, but fated
for destruction.
Come, wave your flaming rods and I'll run for the hills.
Find me a cave where I can sit in a viscous
black tar silence.
Ears to knees pulsing from
what adorns me
These fears
like trinkets, leaden filigree spell them out.

But fear is an anxious heat and a flirt.
I'm drawn into a seductive
reunion with the chilled ground.
If you're lonely you may visit and behold this undoing.
"More weight!"
I'll scream,
until my bones are white ash and my organs are muddy
puddles
and I can, at last, declare I've accomplished something.
My heart stings like it's been enveloped by wasps.
Or maybe I swallowed a ball bearing
and a magnet now summons it through the flesh on my chest.

My breath is a tidepool.
Fills up, froths over, but never quite empties.
My company are displaced, rooming in ill-fitting homes.

It's like I mourn for you
even as I hold you tight, and inhale the memory of my dreams.
No one said it was gonna be easy.
Your heart is the Grand Canyon
I can walk along its edge, scream fiercely at the walls,
hurl rapier sharp words and boulders
down into the depths.
But I'd rather stand motionless in the arid air and let the span of it all
shrink me, bind me, devour me.
Echoes bound off the walls and dissipate into whispers, ghosts.
Dissipate into a momentous silence,
stillness,
containment,
thick walls holding me in your eternity.
I want to build your high horse a stable
let it rest a while
let it lay down with mine.

I want to mill that hot air
see it put to use
turning wheels
blowing glass
warming the soil after a frost.

We'll skip stones across still ponds which once were cast in judgement.

See all that manure bring forth lush vegetation
so that winged beasts may perch and call to the spring.
She showed up limping and my hackles were raised.
I know that limp.
I know that gaze; 1000 yards away.
...(what happened?)...
She could hardly sit down, kept shifting her weight side to side, unable to find comfort, even on a padded bar stool.

"He's a good guy," she said.
"I don't know why...where it came from...I tried to do everything right."

"Trick-***-**-*****!! Lucky I don't **** you."

"At least I've still got my teeth," she offered.

I listen with an open heart to her,
say it's not her fault.
She knows, but why does this keep happening?
I wish I had an answer.

She flinched as I touched her shoulder.
I see now that this, too, was violence.  Physical invasion.
Blurred lines of cruelty and concern, warmth and wickedness.

"No one will believe me...cause he's a good guy..."

I hear you and I believe.
They say I'm in for a year long trip. But maybe less.
a year, or less, of sea sickness, the kind of which no Dramamine will soothe.
I'm surrounded by water I can't keep down
and kept afloat by dark women in white coats.
This clipboard is my life-vest.

Better say good bye now because,
when I finally wash ashore, it won't be to the home I left.

My bed will look very different.
My lover, too.  It will be much longer than a year for her.  
She'll live a lifetime, again and again, with every moon and every sun,
Her body revealing the truths her spirit can't yet face.

Until then she'll stand by water's edge and throw corked bottles of brilliant green past the froth, invoking Poseidon's dominion,
inaudible over the ocean's orchestral din.
Danger

It’s a trap

Don’t go in there

Beware the dog

Who both barks and bites

Brilliant steel overhead

False bottoms

Coils spring to life

It’s a trap

Fall in
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