Seven times we've danced around
That darkest mark of days,
Drifting past the gravity
From whence his path did stray.

Seven journeys round a sun
That no more knows the shade
Of eyes that witnessed 22
And barely more a day.

Seven trips and many moons
Spent staring at the sky,
Wishing I could raise my wrist
And grasp the reasons why

Seven's worth of dreams in which
The 'why' evades me still
And why I when I caress the skin
I feel naught but the chill.

Seven come and seven gone
And seven on my skin
And yet untouched by seven are
The memories of him.

I had to force my lanky legs
a few steps back
And touch only with my eyes
bathe you in the unknowing caress
Of my gaze.
On days like today
I pretend I'm the vivacious wind
Curling in soothing torrents around your face
Brushing past your neck like
Long lost kisses.
I exist in the echo of the scene
one year earlier
where I would have pressed against the skin there
Chasing away the goosebumps
With shivers of my own.

Everything brings back
Thoughts of the Sea
The Tumultuous Ocean
That whispered to me.

Reality is nothing
After all that has passed
Everything’s tainted
Stained and unchaste.

Hours are seconds
Time stopped the day
He breathed out his last
And faded away.

I’ve stopped writing stories
With sticks in the sand
And brushed them away
With slow grieving hands

The water is silent
Where it strokes the shore
Reaching for someone
Not here anymore.

Skim to search the airwaves seeking
To abandon you
I fill this empty silence with a
Useless song or two
In silence creeping, weeping, you fill
Up my nodding head.
And all the words you've spoken hence
Flood forth to fill my head.
The voices on the radio say
All I should have said-
I skip those haunting broken tunes
And search for more instead.
Though truthfully excuses fail to
Negate what is true:
I fill this car with music to
Escape my thoughts of you.

Morpheus has never been kind to me
His somniferous ways leave me wanting
Grasping at the cusp of a reality
As evanescent as the morning mist
That greets this reluctant gaze.

He exists to these sheathed
Bourbon eyes
Within the veiled carapace
Of the only form I've ever wanted more
Than necessity and air.
His torment lies
In false reunions, in joining and parting lips
In forest eyes that linger behind in my thoughts
Like the echo of a cannon
Long after it's wrought its own havoc.

Yes, that twisted Lothario
That Grecian sandman
Exists to overcharge the soul with
Hope so poisonous
Bodies and minds are wracked with it
Inspired by it
Haunted on into the waking world
Where he waits on the periphery
Eyes narrowed in the light
Of the waking world that renders him useless.

Sometimes beneath close eyelids
I quest to bring you back
As if you were driftwood floating
Downstream on your back.
I dip my hands beneath the veil
And dry away the death
And from my parting, weeping lips
I give you back your breath-
Just like the rising sunset burning
In the summer sky
Paints and saints the mountaintops
And casts their colors bright.



Unrhymed Notes:

Sometimes I dream I can bring you back
Just as simply as dipping my hands into the water
To retrieve a floating piece of driftwood;
Dry the death from your skin
And breath life back into you
The way the sunrise reanimates
The Dark Mountains
Each and every day.

I see your Ocean eyes open
Embrace you like I'm trying to
Fold you into my skin
Where I can keep you always
And feel your summer peach warm flesh
Tangible against my permafrost fingers.

If the dead could talk
Nothing profound would leave your lips
They'd only quirk into a Cheshire smile
And you'd tell me to let go
Relinquish
Move along and stop standing still
Life is for the Living
Death is for the dead
And dreams are for the foolish.

"You *******."

You are the sweetest of my torments.
You're the tangible torture of citrus
The bite followed by the ****
Fresh and unbearable in the same instance

You're the lemon zest scent;
Sultry, as I quarter fruit
In my hot summer kitchen.
You're the juice in the cut
As the knife knicks my thumb;
The sweetness meeting the wild coppery tang
of blood in my mouth.

You're in the twist in my chest
That exists somewhere between my heart and my stomach
Both organs being wrenched apart...
When I see your picture
And remember that we haven't spoken in months.

I'm just here
Standing on a street
Staring into the gaslights
Trying their hardest, like me
To push back the grim.

Were you a summer citrus fruit?
I'm unsure.
You struck me with a sweetness
So demanding it curled my tongue;
Flooded my mouth with hours of sunlight
And warmth.
I peeled you eagerly down
Knowing each sliver as I handled it
Consumed with the simple scent
Of something so pure and clean.
Eagerly cast aside, I exposed
The sweetest secret
And felt your balmy flesh with my fingers
Learning each groove and plain
As if you'd never wither.
Silken skin brushed my lips
And I felt the hours of  sun,
The showers of rain that resonated
In each pace of time that shaped you
Into the gentle perfection before me.
Tasting all of that, I swore you were a flavor
Somewhere between citrus
Summer grass and lilac.

Were you a citrus fruit?
Who knows,
But in your absence
Any sweetness has been a
Vague reproduction
An echo of a necessity
That tasted of luxury.

Winter has settled in
And paley, I am deficient.

Tell me so that you may
Keep me or cast me
Off to a place where I can
Forget, forgo
A life of missing you.

The air was lilac on the day
The sunset touched the earth in grey.
The velvet breeze caressed the grass
Of meadows rooted in the past.

A ring of trees bore witness to
The blurr of light that cut on through
The dusky darkness of the way
Your silence stole my breath away.

We paced the clearing, fed our sight
With fireflies like Christmas lights-
And up above, the navy sky
Breathed starlight in a soft reply.

Borderline, borderlands
Of shifting, whipping, changing sands
Around the ankles, grain by grain
You're buried once, then twice again.
The grains are hot, the earth is cold
Your failing stance will never hold
The North wind blows, then South returns
The nights are freezing, Sunshine burns.

A mile forth, and rain will fall
A suffocating summer squall
Another mile, and the snow
Will freeze you solid, keep you cold.

I watched the wind on summer days,
The way it plays havoc with the meadow grass
And wish the words
MY words-
Could be plucked and carried on that breeze
Like a seedling
To go where they need to
And where I cannot.

Morpheus has never been
A kindly lover, nor precious friend
Yet in this stead, he strives to be
Replacement for reality.

Sominiferous ways that heat my blood;
Make my wilting spirits bud
Leave me wanting, never free
There on the cusp of reality.

Like morning mist, not half so pleasant
His remedies are evanescent
From where he lives behind my eyes
And plagues my shattered paradise.

He wears the exquisite carapace
For whom I yearn upon his face
And therein's where my torment lies
From golden skin and forest eyes-

From false reunions, makeshift bliss
From joining eyes and parting lips
Like cannon fire, the sound's refrain
Draw parallels to this cruel pain.

That Grecian Sandman, Morpheus
Lothario, for whom exists
To overchage the soul with hope
So poisonous, I gasp and choke-

Yet bodies, minds, and souls alike
Find inspiration from the strife
And haunted persons, like myself
Endure his falsehoods where we're held.

He haunts the dreamless, lucid world
Upon the cusp, the conscious swirl
His narrowed eyes, his blunted sight
Despise waking world of light.

In the dawn, I saw you there
With misty eyes and tousled hair
And with the sunlight flooding though,
I knew the summer scent of you.

You trickled yourself over me
The way the light pulsed through the trees.
And hand to hand we carried on
Across the dampened morning lawn.

Our pluming breath of spectored speech
Soared skyward towards the dancing leaves.
Gaze to gaze, brown to green
The morning lost it's sacred gleam.

All things fade
Rain washes away the deeds done
Somewhere on the earth, in the trees
On a winding path, where the fireflies
Like failing Christmas lights flicker.

I skirt the line
Tread the edge
Of the 'maybe'
At the ledge.
See the eddies,
Traces the swirls
That coalesce
To join our worlds.

The taste of green's
A bitter bite
That's left me bleeding
Fled my sight.
The restful red
Sustaining me
Has fallen Grey
Unerringly.

Fighting gravity always seemed futile
But hand over hand, I gripped each fissure
Ignoring the natural patterns
Denying the pull towards the inevitable end.
And you're an ever surging mountain
That scrapes the sky
Like the sun personified
And I- a wingless Icarus
Long to stray close enough
To burn the tips of my reaching fingers once more.

Planted firmly on the ground
My feet would wander aimlessly anyway
Always circling the base
Always coming back to the place where I could tilt my head back
See you shining there, perched atop your shrine
Like the most beautiful treasure
Like the unattainable cookie jar on the refrigerator
Only no amount of crying will ever place you in my eager hands
No amount of sweetness could quell my need for you.

No, hand over hand
I push against what should be,
What is,
And what will never be.
Struggling against
The necessity of
Letting go.

I saw goodbye in the green
And shuttered in the space between
The paces that would close the gap-
Where I would take my silence back.

Yet parted of lips bore nothing more
Then wisps of breath, just as before
And turning without tracing back
My march on forward stays the track.

With nothing more to fill the air
My feet sought miles far from there
And yet the shell marched forward when
My heart did circle back again.

And then the gap grew to contain
Seasons past, The wind and rain
Weeks to months, a year's refrain
Would never see us touch again.

The grass is greenest where it's watered,
Yet I know where it rains is broader
And here above-tipped gray- the weight
Informs me that my reach is great.

Crawling there through the mud I

Scraped along, through flesh and blood

The water came in rivulets

In floods that I could not forget.



Gravel ground and broken glass

Over where my body’s passed.

Marked time in pulse memories with

Seconds to days with no end to see.



Salvation was just there beyond

Where light and crash does oft respond

This overhead swirled in the sky

As lightning bolts came crashing by.



Up there beyond the cloudy seas

Where I dream that I can drift on free

In Sunshine’s arms and nothing more

Than rest and heal against these sores.



The journey’s half the story then

When’s this journey going to end?

Somewhere anon, and somewhere close

Somewhere new, yet missed the most.

The sun tipping over the horizon
Lifts my lids each revolution of this Shady green sphere...
And for a few brief seconds
The fingers of sleep
Drag me back.

Warm pressure on my eyes,
Pooling, (re)opening them to the last
Paradise;
The only oasis where your eyes are not closed
And your bones are not dust somewhere
Mingling with the soil in Pittsburgh.

Just the same, I know you're the product now
Of some hypnagogic state;
Of the last traces of theoretical DMT swirling in my brain
As is leaves Morpheus behind in the shadows.

You're just the most beautiful hallucination
The truth in the chaos of dreams
Cluing me into what I've been denying
For 13 years.

Impossible that I've preserved you better
Than any mortician could have
In the recesses of my mind
You are a perfect replica
An unholy copy of the original
All creamy skin
And ocean eyes,
Full-lipped smile tipping somewhere between
Arrogance and joy.

"I'm gone," you say. "I'm dead."
Repeating what I already know
"I'm dead, I'm not coming back."
On repeat like the worst kind of ear worm;
A carousel of sound that dips and weaves through every filament of Unconsciousness.

Denial; like reaching out my hands
I shove against the reality, against the unreality
Against the prison sleep has woven
And crash forth
Damp and gasping
Like breaking the surface once more
Teetering over the horizon with the sun
Into the waking hell of another day.

The carousel makes another revolution.
See you on the other side tonight.

Seldom though eventually
His words will wash away
The human mind's a yawning sieve
That siphons thoughts away

For all we are is flesh and blood
And dust, in all due time
His face embedded in my thoughts
Will someday leave my mind.

Each grain of sand; each thought of him
Will slither down the glass
Slow and steady, one by one
Until he's in the past.

For now my mind's a youthful cache,
No wave can wear or wash
Impressions left upon my soul
Cannot be staved or quashed.



-Un-rhymed Notes-

*Every once in a while
The human mind is all it's built up to be;
A sieve, where the balm of time
slowly mends and knits
The torn edges of the chasm.

Every once in a while
It is as if the wound has healed
And the flow of muscle memory
Ripples beneath the unmarred surface

In my chest, the tipping point's
A high hailed peak that scrapes the sky
The concept tips from front to back
And longs to plunge from either side.

In one which way, the drop would shake
The foundation of what's inside
The collision point would rend the base
And throw a fissure far and wide

The sure descent, the easy course
Should this notion plunge rightfully
Would quiet yearning, wanting things
That have no right to come to be.

Though balance seems precarious
Atop this inner mountain top
Decisions cease to help provoke
This fickle notion's needed drop

Place you in the netherplace
An internal nudge to nowhere
Where the line of your smile hurts less
Than a break;
More a persistent ache or
A fading bruise.
In absence,
The presence is still there…
I can still smell the summer on your skin
Catch traces in the steps I’ve taken
To keep the span of the earth between.

The cusp of the moment
Felt like a precipice;
Like pressure rising before
That first flash of lightning
That bleeds into the next.
The air was charged
Before those words were said;
The crackle as tangible as static
Raising hairs along my arms.

They felt like hands
Spreading across the furled wing-bones of
My shoulders
It was that gasp before the shove,
The realization dawning,
The knowledge of the fissure below
Where the sun found no purchase.

The words left her lips
And I fell
Unhindered to a place
Where you're not breathing.

The sun is a star in someone else's sky
The earth is a dust fleck, drifting on by
The moon is nothingness, just barely there
Between non-existence and thought caught on air.

Maybe you're nothing, and then so am I
But to me you are everything seen by these eyes.

The mirror of the lake
Where herons hurried during day-
Hailed the hazy nighttime
Off a long forgotten way.

The billows of the water broken
By the cashmere wind,
Painted a mirage of which
The hemlocks dwelled within.

And up against the inky shore
Where dafodils did bloom,
Two bodies did embrace beneath
The new September moon.