Tungsten with an atomic number of 74,
Like the years a couple will spend together.
Newlyweds with rings made from Tungsten.
Their love shown by the rings on their fingers.
Love held together by a ring with the highest melting point.
One's love can come in many shapes and colors,
Like Tungsten going from dark grey to almost white.
A couples love can shine as bright as Tungsten in the sun.
Even with dark times their love will power through,
Their love as strong as Tungsten.

The darkness now descending floods the city as it dies
while shadows lurk in legions 'neath the looming Evil Eye.
Its frozen stare envelops all, it penetrates and pries,
denouncing loathed dissenters to the keepers in the sky.

One’s inner thoughts are well descried before they’ve passed one’s lips
and cruelly crushed with grim contempt twixt despots’ fingertips;
and when a taboo-idea’s found, with which to come to grips,
the Evil Eye dispenses pus and fabrication drips.

The Evil Eye peers down on us to conquer and control,
and marks our every movement, be we hiding in a hole
or preening like a purple parrot perched upon a pole.
Our welfare and our happiness? No, certainly’s not the goal.

For Princes rule with tungsten fists wherever they may roam
and sip from golden goblets, nectar, sweet as honeycomb
while peons (stripped of mind and soul) stray never far from home,
with faces 'neath the iron boot, ****** deep below the loam.

While phantoms fade, then reappear within the urban sprawl,
the gloom (adorned with Evil Eyes which pierce the livid pall)
pervades the ache and agony that poets sometimes scrawl
of plenitude to penury, how life endures the fall.

And peasants pass, parading by to fill the golden urn
with pennies for the afterlife wherefore the faithful yearn,
though screams of babes with empty eyes are never of concern
to those who covet silver coins, eyes cold, tongues taciturn.

And should the herd dare whisper words of freedom's fragrant bloom
or murmur sighs of worriment at earth's impending doom,
the Evil Eye will squint a bit at those who so presume,
condemning nascent untamed thoughts to wither in the womb.

The Evil Eye inspects us all, then tattles to the kings
(manipulating puppet people, pulling on the strings)
extracting secrets from our souls like spiders plucking wings
that flutter round the hangman’s knot as freedom’s carcass swings.

To hide the pains of purgatory, far-flung distant shores
(on islands of containment) cache the dingy dungeon doors
and inquisition water-boards that buoy their holy wars,
while sandmen drape our eyes with dust and rainbow metaphors.

We’ll know the party's over when there's little left to eat
and all the learned scholars, lean, stay silent when they meet -
the Evil Eye will spawn distrust on matters indiscreet.
The signs are all around us - even sheep no longer bleat.

                                    Epilogue
One sightless seer scans the skies and mourns the heretofore.
Two limbless men descend the stairs to find there is no floor.
Three tongueless women babble, telling tales of nevermore.
Four earless children drown within the ocean's muted roar.

When doubt becomes defiance, ask: Will bedlam soon arrive?
Will doves appear above us all, or drones to guard the hive
while fed with milk and honey by the Queen and kept alive
to gut the gale below them? Will the Evil Eye survive?

Coming home from a fair,
cusped between your lap
a globe of darting eyes,
your hands rested atop
the thin film of a world
as you endlessly peer in.
Are you scrying over
your future career?

Here a tungsten bulbous
body, a chunk of flame,
swills itself in spins
and mindless dances,
as you think you could
be so careless like them
to live hazily in a framed
bubble of treasured youth,

fed by some divine fate
looking over you. Golden
scales make your skin,
binds you as if you were
a chocolate in a wrapper
for people to circus over–
every flicker being edible.
Or maybe you're like

those tinned peach slices,
posing in a cage for all  
as a marvel to feast with
until you end up rotting,
there in your tomb-space,
muttering an open mouth,
“help me” before they serve
you up on a silver-lined dish.

I assure you, you'll forget
these childish thoughts
of aspirations and dreams
sooner than you think:
no matter how much
you think they want you,
I'll bet they'll let yourself
drown in coming weeks.

I have never heard grey more grey
then the words which you say to me so
condescendingly.
Never endingly.
Black and white means naught
in a world of (k)nots and (flattened) cans.
And dressed up in blue, you’re always beautiful.
But crude and **** we stand in the sun;
every pockmark illuminated, tungsten bright.
The light of night to never shine again against
the delicate steel door that closes like your hand
around the flitting, panicked moth.
Magnesium smiles and pain pill duplicity,
the simplicity of a (remote) controlled world.
I am trapped between the clean street signs
and the signs of a dead language.
Where is the line of your back and what
is the time?
Have I lost the only things that
made me sigh with relief?
(Who is the real thief?)

LIGHTBULB.

Lightbulb; the moths flutter
and beat themselves to death against an idea.
A thought, vivid like glass, bright like tungsten-
glows.

I am reaching out to my mind again,
my wings burned and burdened...Wait.
I have lost track of my metaphors again...
But then again, like the moths,

I have lost track of many things-
except for the unknown light in front of me.

Someone collect all the hatred,

and all the vehemence too.

then don't recycle or reciprocate it.

turn it all into something else,

rich and green and full of kindness.

distill it, remove the impurities,

coagulate it away from it's cold

tungsten tensile titanium.

some of us only have to try,

it can be done. Einstein said so;

and Mother Teresa and Gandhi,

and Martin Luther King Jr.

Someone collect all the hatred,

and all the vehemence too.

then don't recycle or reciprocate it.

turn it all into something else,



rich and green and full of kindness.

distill it, remove the impurities,

coagulate it away from it's cold

tungsten tensile titanium.

encase it in concrete and steel,

bury it with the radioactive waste.

let it lie for it's half life,

in over 40,000,000 tears.

I was doing
something
when a flash
smashed out
to every corner
of the room.

It came like
ominous bolts
of lightning
had leapt from
the light bulb
bursting inside,

as though
storms had been
brewing slowly
under a muzzle
of glass frame.
I regarded how

strange it was
to be fed up
to a thrum of
75 watts
in its lifetime,
to finally break

its broadcast.
I look to a
tungsten tongue,
see the ember
flick into the dark
and say,

*I lost my religion.