I am tired of my rants
like a millions hammers
pounding away in my brain
constant chatter drowns sanity
expectations love and affection
comfort insecurities and misadventures
regrets lost and found
a million lives not lived
what could be and what is
hauntings and remembrances
shadows looming large on today
today that is not perfect
perfection that is just in mind
mind on verge of lunacy
constant screams drowned
in the agonizing void
void that is my life

I am tired, very tired

tears they have a mind of their own
roll down when you least expect
open your soul to strangers
strangers that glare
stay in dark away from glare
tucked in blanket of oblivion
lost and lonely yet sane
lost and lonely yet sane

My childhood comes in fond waves of recollection.

The holiday seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas were always my favorite times of the year. Times in which familial bonds felt their strongest. It was so easy and wonderful to be swept up in the whimsical magic of the holidays. Little problems or concerns are forgotten for the sake of repeating another year of well-constructed joy.

I would shiver with glee as we unpacked our three-foot-tall artificial spruce, set it on a stack of boxes covered with sheets, and decorated it with care. Proudly displayed in the window of our single wide trailer. Every night before bed I'd stare at it admiringly.

It ******* glistened.

My mother and I would piece together a jigsaw puzzle on a card table set up in our living room while watching Christmas movies on TV. It was humble, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I recall being upset one year when my father (correctly) guessed that I bought him a Buck Knife for his Christmas gift. He then made a comment suggesting that he didn't need another knife. It crushed me because I thought it was the perfect gift for a man I tried so hard to relate to.

Most of my childhood memories are filled with joy.

Pretending my G.I. Joes inhabited the branches of our softly lit tree. The elf and angel ornaments were either friend or foe and offered either shelter or a diabolical plot of destruction. The angel atop the tree (from my mother's first marriage in the '70s) was the queen that all the other ornaments and soldiers bowed down before.

She was a goddess.

These days I can't help but be brutally honest with myself and acknowledge that the connection to my biological family is barely existent.

There are no jigsaw puzzles.
No Buck Knives.
No glistening lights.
No tree.

Just me alone in an apartment with a glass of whiskey.

There was a time when I carried on the gleeful tradition of the holidays. With my own three children by my side, I carefully placed that angel from the '70s atop the tree.

I think they were as enamored by her as I once was. I could see the innocent thrill in their eyes.

I haven't looked into their eyes for over a year.

The naive childhood excitement of the holiday season is a distant memory. Now, these days on the calendar remind me of things I will never experience again. They gently, but painfully enter like a dagger between my ribs.

The wound is reopened every ******* year.

I look around and see happy little families shopping for holiday meals and gifts as I push my humble cart around the grocery store alone. I imagine them with a crackling fireplace in their living room like I once had; decorating the tree and listening to holiday tunes. Dancing and giggling.

I can't help but wonder if my children are placing that angel atop the tree with their new dad.

The angel their grandmother passed along.

Her broken marriage.
My broken marriage.

And still, that cardboard angel sits atop the tree spreading joy.

She's a goddess.

Hello, Hello
You avenger of the dark
I see you sulking, waiting
Are you hunting or do you fear the light,
Vampire?

Vampire, Vampire
This place is your temple
Your victim the lamb
Are those fangs for blood or romantic
Desire?

Desire, Desire
Hearts pumping life
Lovers hunting lovers hauntings
Do you fear the cross or the sun's
Fire?

Fire, Fire
Set to burn
Sent to blaze
Shall I burn your world or show you the
Empire?

Empire, Empire
Watch it grow
'Till it crashes and falls
Will you save yourself, or feed on the ******,
Vampire?

Shatter music as relief
when the rest will burn away
until only bits remain
and I beg for it to be day

Nighttime as my prison
when my hauntings ride the dark
and even in the morning
on my eyelids leave their mark

When sleep unfolds my mind
my dreams leave scars upon my feet
where my demons creep inside
and my fears and sorrows meet

I'm encrypted in this pain
and I feel as though I'll never escape
so I submit to endless agony
of death and torture, sin and ****.

Lightning striking through a nervous system,
Blood pumping facetious fire.
Whispers through my home, hauntings of trauma and dreams of the crucifix stand.
The flaming star of the avatar.
The predator and the prey, predetermined and praying.
Just another eternity until the monsoon departs, the season ended. From there the calm waves will carry me to shore.
The dark, restful, kiln, I am your dough, as I am your clay, a grateful panettone.
Mold me, endow me the drug, the decree, the great recipe of relinquishment.
I rejected asylum, I denounced Gehenna,
Cold blooded sunbathing in the radiant rays of the great bird's wings.
The boiling embrace of his soft feathered fire.
The brutal, unrelenting, chaotic, climactic, pull into the hot murky depths.
Scald me, lash me, revive me in death.
For I can wait no longer.
Living in fear of the Reaper is worse than The Harvest itself.
So come unto me my lord, my peace,
And engulf me in the ******* rest.

ARIES: stay away from cats claws and hours past midnight. good day for purple lips and kissing your mothers cheek

TAURUS: your leg hair will grow and it will feel like beauty. you are lost and will not be found and this will feel like being a child again

GEMINI: clocks will move backwards for you today. when his hand catches in your hair, go home with your shoes clutched to your chest.

CANCER: spiders beckon new hope and your feet will crush the crocuses in your front yard. don’t be late.

LEO: today is a day to listen. listen to silence, listen to noise, listen to sobs, listen to laughter, listen to your heartbeat. hush

VIRGO: itchy scars are a sign of past romance bubbling to the surface. avoid broken windows and crying

LIBRA: you will love your freckles in the mirror and when he says he does not, leave him. good day for hauntings

SCORPIO: you will feel it. bad day for fresh-cut flowers

SAGITTARIUS: two chimes means a secret is about to be revealed. watch for smudged mascara and track marks

CAPRICORN: destruction comes with a price. squeeze her hand extra tight when you leave; she’ll be back eventually.

AQUARIUS: you can not be silenced today; this is not always good. bad day for second hand books

PISCES: read your mail and stay out of the rain. avoid gray eyes and sleeping late

I knew Her as an angel
She is remembered as a ghost
Haunting every memory
with love that now is lost

Her ways were
near to perfect
until the shadows
touched Her soul
The bitter winds
they overtook Her
far more fierce
than She could hold

Now the hauntings
of Our memories
and the tragedy
that did befall
is all that's left
me to remember
of the angel whose
name I once did call

Beauty then to darkness
as the shadows
haunting pause
Reveal a ghost before me
where an angel
there once was

Remembering an angel
when surely She is lost
I turn and focus onward
Righteous vengeance
then my cause.

-R.

(12.16)

-LA
-4MAR

Is there to be no reprieve
from the mental rack
of present hauntings
resurrecting a persistent
and pervading past ?

Into the more than endless night
they loom, dressed in cloaks
and armed with countless daggers,
rusted in their deep graves.

They plunge and contort
the heart into a shapeless mass
of free-floating anxieties
dominating and dissecting
every half-conscious syllable

destroying all feeble endeavours
at any semblance of normality.

...
I was born into this shadow of beauty we call the American dream, but I was raised in foreign silhouettes. The same exact silhouettes that raised my mother. My first memories were of her forest gods and alpine stories that have taught me how to write spiderwebs into the hearts of the miserable so my words could hold them together. My deadushka's magic could turn monsters into swans with a wink because his love was so contagious. My babushka's, on the other hand, showed me how to howl like darkness so even the wolves would know silence. I was born as spilled as it comes; as ink.  I now understand what tragedies look like at first;  ("Blessings")

As my mother picks her way across a war with me in her arms, the world catcalls that I am a half-blood puppet. The daughter with Russian strings and American footsteps. I arrive in America where I am reminded I belong here, but that was the first lie that my mother ever fed to me. To this day, it still tastes like expired love.

As my father spent all his kindness on me in the earliest years of my life I was given an English tongue and it bullied my Russian one into suicide. That is the only thing my father ever planted in me that he wanted to grow. Those seeds of words I would later bear fruit as ripe poetry.  Those fruit of the novels I will someday write as fiction into flesh. However, what is written beneath our skin doesn't necessarily always fit in our mouths. My father's greatest mistake was beating me into a ghost, but giving me the power to write about his hauntings.  His abuse moves into our house shortly after he realizes I am a tragedy, not a blessing.

As I write myself into the moon one day I will become, I meet a boy who's laughter makes all the planets look dull.  We learn to not walk like apologies, but like young legends. He was my first real taste of sunlight since I was brought here, and he spoke heaven into my eyes until I saw it. We loved each other like Peter Pan and Wendy did; deeply, cluelessly, and forever. Our immortality was a toy in the eyes of those who envied us. Yet he summoned the fires we should have feared as kids, but instead we stared into them and smiled. We were happy, and we were never sorry for that.

April 3rd, 2007. He died. That was the day I was old enough to grow out of a blessing and into the clothes of a tragedy. That was the day the heaven spilled from my eyes like the great flood and went with him. My mother theorizes that is why my eyes aren't as blue as hers anymore. The sounds of bullets hitting bodies today, even ten years later, between then and long ago, has the power to create painful afterimages of him. The post traumatic stress unfastens my blood from my my body and the poetry reacts by shutting me down all at once. Death asks me to write a spiderweb into his own heart, but I refuse.

I adopted grief into my family and he got along with abuse pretty well. To survive, I've left the nostalgia of that boy to hibernate deep in my bones.

Today is April 3rd, 2017.  I stand before a headstone that exists only sometimes in my head. I kneel before it and leave the skeleton of my love like a bouquet of roses. The shadows and silhouettes align, and I hold hands with both of them.

I weep as the odes of "it's not your fault" fall onto my ears like they do every year. From friends, lovers, and family. They mean well. Who knows, maybe someday I will have what it takes to believe them.

But he never grew up, so guilt still ***** it's wings here.

---"Sermons with a colorblind priest."

As a seed, I was shot out the back end of a blue jay when, heedless, she flew over the meadow. Now, a willow, I drowse above the pond where their bodies float—skin gilded with algae, lips parting the surface, chests arching to the sun. Her sighs ripple outward—her lover drinks them in.

They are wet-silk hair, glistening sweat. Tracing each other’s folds, a slow, open arc startling minnows. Their toes stir the mud where my roots explore.

The blue jay died mid-migration. I barely recall her. Here, they are the only sonnet: lips on sun-warmed skin, their kiss that bends reeds. Below, their legs tangle like my branches—fluid, unpruned.

A heron spears the pond. Startled, they sink. For a breath—water holds them. When they rise, the town whispers of hauntings.

They are not ghosts—just peaches overripe in August.

Welcome inside!
My own purgatory.
My twisted mind.
My melted story.

Down every hallway,
open a different door.
Tempted by temptation,
fearing nature's *****.

Mirrors on the ceiling,
reflecting a dark stare.
Blood drips from the corners,
makes you want to dare.

Tiptoe to the staircase,
spirals out of pitch.
Death grip on the banister,
devil makes me trip.

Sinister and evil,
shadows follow me.
No more mental hauntings,
wake me from this dream.

Trapped by my surroundings,
biting every bit,
Seeing everything red,
by every blowing hit.

No perfect little world,
or perfect little bell.
Won't you trade me places?
Within my own living hell