being disharmonious
with the whisper of death,
my father sentiently orchestrates
his final moments.

the cancer enfolds, unbending;
inverting throughout him like a small womb
unfolding the fabric of his universe.
his torso ebbs with these insatiable flowers.
he is born again into death knowing love,
dreaming his journey into being. his children
shedding symphonies of his laughter
are woven into silence; as he dies
a fully spread bouquet—beautiful
in the face of surreptitious sabotage.
it must be cumbersome for him. to grow
backwardly. still, though—outwardly,
he hefts it peacefully. dying a mountain—
symphonic—and in bloom.

Love will grow in me sideways, a supine pine
sapling, shoveling mountainous glaciers of stone

embedded into my boiling erosions, melting
the anaerobic hot mud into a calmer froth.

We may kiss at the precipice of the abyss
our love has inevitably chewed through itself.  

And I will likely palm our weathers
into a river-swallowing sea

and you will hate me; desert of a future
companion’s ship—can I

swallow my dominance; that devotion
could bloom from this love’s wilderness,

foresting in perennial fullness,
prospering in the shared bed
rock we have carved into orchids.  

At the place where I will bury my bones
in the murderous entrancement of another,

taiga could storm from the soft ring of fire
between twenty interlocked evergreen fingers.

poetry does not sleep in my hand
and kindness is something I value as
half true almost as often as people
mistake what I am now
for what I will be when I
am neither magnanimous
nor synchronized
with what I was before
in the circular continuum
where I am flailing on all
edges and slopes of your sea
like a valley; on all fours,
all aspects of me
are all aspects of me
and I am whole
where I am gentle
where I am cruel
and where I, a pacifist
ignite these wars between us
I am digging these moats to embody
and receive all we drink in
each other that is chaos and peace
will always be there to refill the cup
of your heart as my purpose in life.