——————————————————

sleeping beside
a man breathing
wildly awake,
he speaks in the dark from the bottom of
the most bottomless place

questions asked in the dark
we lose sight
we get lost
scared by what we find

daylight has direction,
or rather,
you can see what to avoid,
a fork in the road and we always go right
til we're left with nothing but

why

in the middle of the night

Mistress seems strange,
Taught to read lines,
A voice, practiced, undermines
A mistake, replaced, small change,
Out of Their pockets into silver sockets that
Shine when it Rains.

She's under a roof,
Need not,
want not,
the handful of proof,
That when the crowd gets loud,
They paint her Red,
But the Stage paints her White.

Mistress seems different,
Trained to believe, to perform,
Playing the part was significant.
Ignore the cracks,
a pleased crowd comes back and
She'll get her pay, so long as
She sticks to the way she was raised.

She found the trapdoor.
It led to the boy whose fingers
Were scored from
Scripts he'd never written.
He spoke off cue,
though she thought him kind,
There was salt in his wounds.

He capsized the boat.
A stage that'd been sailing,
but barely afloat.

Mistress is gone.
Her life turned around,
As she took the hand of the boy,
who promised she wouldn't drown.

He works in a building with many windows, but no exits. ??

There is a box for everyone. ?
Coffee is served at 9, black. ?
Printers scan the same papers,?
making copies, and copies, and copies?
of rewritten words. Rewritten ?by men in the same suits.  ??

The light is white. ?
The sun does not come through windows, black. ?
Plastic plants are dying beside colorless walls.

But late at night, ?when the boxes are empty, ?
and the moon comes through windows, silver. ?
Beside the plants, he’ll paint a creature on the wall?
big enough to make its own exit. ?
And away they go.

There were ashes on the floor when
he first moved in.
Soon unnoticed as I watched him begin
to leave his biggest bags at the door and
handle small candles in the
darkest corners.

There were cracks on the walls,
against the white he used the flickering light
to make tall shadow puppets,
and made a smile flash like a switchblade.

Dusting ashes,
coals appeared,
the ones he revered to keep near but kept his scalded hands
in his holeless pockets,
palms wiped with the balm of the hidden places
he settled.

Many opened their gates,
but few have the space to sustain the boy who
refrained from making a home
inside those who were
never truly alone.

I knew where he was,
all along I could hear him playing that song,
a heavy sound resonating and sinking tones
into,
into,
into the weakest bones,
easily snapped,
but he reigned the cracks back in
from breaking beyond
thinner skin.

It was an inferno in the making,
this new found hero unaware
he'd be pouring gasoline over tiny heartstrings.

Wary sparks kept their mark in unlocated edges,
afraid any product of the name
would make everything in it's entirety
go up in flame.
But a mouth started to taste smoke,
clouded eyes began to see a familiar face
in blacker windows.

The feeling was branded, less than fragile, more than candid.

And it hurt to write with burnt fingertips.

Choking,
a suffocation could be an equal devastation
so the broken hands wrote for
the chance to breathe.
They found relieve
in the boy who refused to drop his lit fuse,
eyes unignoring to the fire left roaring,
a warmth on his cheeks
from the heat of one light he allowed to be nothing less than
impossibly bright.