Strings, strings, wrapping around porcelain skin,
For why does the bruises not show?
With a waist, hip, and two legs that are so thin,
For why does the skin always glow?
Hair that never sheds, nor grows, nor messes,
For why does the girl not wash it?
With a merry face that still never truly expresses,
For why does the face not show even a slight fit?
Stoic, conjoined, the feet never stomping,
For why does the limbs never feel frostbit?
Perhaps it is a lie that the being is a girl,
As it is only with strings that she can ever twirl.

I pose high my chest of ragged ribbons
And unravel a fist to stretch out fingers in search
Of a hand glimmering pale like a lantern
throughout this grey
        empty space. Once a pavement, now as good as

Cloud. Frozen lake. Dust. Boiling ashes. Skeletons.

I am walking on the slashed frames of waves
As jesus once must have. Propelled to a miracle unwitnessned
To anyone but myself. I am impelled to corrode
Into a statue; to remain a rigamortic rotting jade jewel in the sun
Until I no longer can.
Until they found me...

Perhaps they'd dust me off, thaw the ice from my shoulders,
Rehydrate me and gorge me,
Restart the blinking light in my brain
And refrain me evermore from having to seek.

But seek I must, for the lonliness weighs me down
Further by the day. I take half as many steps now as when I began my voyage.
My memories are like ghosts of flames that play
Snakes and ladders and hide and seek.
I am the lighthouse man and I sail drunken--
A rubicund mishape of bone and scuffed thoughts,
I can feel every soul which once embodied and huddled this place.

It's like they are trying so hard to posses me but even
Their souls have been smouldered to whispers
So thin they ring as mutely as the surrounding mist,
So soft they vibrate akin to an infant’s pulse
Throughout these walls, these scrapyards, these crumbling arcades, this sandbox grey that begs for a scream.
The spirit of a tarantula trembles along my back and grazes it teeth against my shoulderblade,
Preying that I turn to confirm it's being –but it's a game I’ve long grown sick of–


I am the lighthouse man and I ceased having a face long ago.
What I recall of my reflection was a child so young and so sure
Of a different life that

I cannot be sure it's even me.

I am the lighthouse man; a puckered bulb balancing on too-big shoulders, that walked
  through barren flat closes and exited empty handed, the lonely poltergeist,
a bitter flab of skin.

I am the lighthouse man and I am the final Aspen leaf in the pond of the universe,
I see myself reflected in a sole star twirling underfoot and overhead
rowing my ears so thick with disfigured silence so that I wish I was born deaf.
I am the lighthouse man and my mind is a spinning fragment
    my eyes can merely follow and my floating steps merely trail.

It never changes tone here, I can only vaguely trace the time
By the occasional moon. Tonight it shines half chewed,
  Befitting the levelled star a sideways crown.
It is beautiful but I mustn't stop to admire, lest a survivor
Scavenger loses patience withholding the last of their scran.

I am the lighthouse man and I haven't eaten in years.

I am the lighthouse man and I bled for the first time yestardy.
I am the lighthouse man and my bulb ricocheted off the base of my skull
In a telling fairy tale dream. I felt static in my head
And my light's ink spilled across my hands and for a minute I thought
My light had gone out. I tasted blood,
Trickled down from my stinging nose and I had never been so scared.

I am the lighthouse man and I never knew I could die.

I am the lighthouse man. Once the world danced with magic and I was
A walking satellite that grew to want to dissapear.
I am the lighthouse man and my decrepitude is casted in my hands:
Black as the night from the dirt collected over the years.
The few slashes of skin clear enough to see look rust-like and obtrusive, outdone only by
My veins like wonky bruises that vine across the silhouetted bone;
Bridging gear to gear, clinking shivering knuckles
         That want nothing more than to surrender.

But I am only frostbit, not frozen.
Life was and thus must still be.
I am a raindrop, not the whole ocean.

I am a walking lighthouse inspecting and guiding empty seas,
A form without virtue
That ceased feeling it's metallic steps too long ago to recall.
A cubist teardrop falling down a grey giant's cheek,
Waiting to be captured and swallowed.

Or perhaps I am climbing uphill, slowly along the circumference of his forehead.
So slowly I cannot notice the rise. Perhaps I was destined to amble in hypnosis,
En route on this colourless limboid curve until I forget the concept of
             a destination, a soul, a matryr jester to rouse me awake...
             and perhaps it is then that I will be blessed with the heavenly bulb

Of the weeping giant on whom's flesh I disturb.
I am the lighthouse man and I dream of purpose.

I am the the lighthouse man with a penchance to levitate
I am the lighthouse man and I am a God without tool or reason.
I am the lighthouse man and I'll walk this limbo until my feet dissapear.

I am the lighthouse man and I am cursed.
I am the lighthouse man transitioning between lives and never knowing
Causality nor the answer. There are no questions to have;

I am the lighthouse man and I must have been a murderer in my past life.
I am the lighthouse man and I can feel my inner fuses twist,
Falling fainter and fainter by the second.
I am the lighthouse man and I will not make it another night.
I am the lighthouse man and I am a memory-bank full of nothing remarkable.
If I felt this months ago then perhaps I would make due with the my sojourn of an empty house, atop a parked car, and perhaps I would be contempt with rotting.

But now the moon shines so luminously bright and full and close! So very close!
I am the lighthouse man and I chase the moon.
I am the lighthouse man and I vaguely recall my mother saying 'do not eat the moon,
It will give you nightmares!’ and it all suddenly makes sense now.

The stars are all out tonight and they await my company. I am the lighthouse man and now I run.
I run run run run for the sky in ode to the rest of the bodies that abandoned this place.

your light is beautiful
and mine is glum
in your eyes i find
sensations my estranged blood
has never felt
to touch, to love ...a soul unselfishly
for no other reason than to love

i want to place my frostbit hands
upon your beating chest
and ****** you away
or might I chain your hands
and take you with me

i could pull you into my gale
a hostage of my lonely curiosity
but I'm afraid, so afraid that your light
will fill the empty gaping blackness
and your gentle breaths
will calm my feral winds
you alone will effortlessly transpose
the thunder of my bones and
i will assent that only your nearness
can bring the calm to the eye
of my storm

but what follows when you
tire of breaking my weathers
when your chains rust into reddish ash
and i can no longer keep you, my love
i can’t imagine this place will ever be
as fair as it was with you
and i can only foresee that
which will become of me

for when the day does break
and I find myself alone
when the silence of your absent
lungs deafens my troubled mind
my storm will surge again

and as the black clouds surround
i will bring my withered hands
before me and remove the foolish eyes
that once lost themselves in you
so there are two sunken holes
inside my skull
i will cut through my sternum and
rip my dour heart from my chest
i will undress from my flesh and
pull the nerves you once caressed
and my naked soul will dig a grave
and settle into the dark

I have my heart open like a winter morning, like his birthday gift
wrapped in brown paper bags
clutching at the shreds
as if loving me more will make me less sad. It has not:
see, my bones shatter like icicles,
I am weak. His affection melts like snowflakes on my tongue.

I want to taste him until the flesh pares
and someone can finally take me to the hospital where we kissed
have a glance of what’s intact,
better, what isn’t.

It has been December every day since I last visited you, Doc
but you have good eyes – can watch hell freeze in
my chest. The calendar says July, but my body doesn’t believe it
possessed from memories of a woman
retching in this very room here, behind a screen
you saw my boyfriend naked and behind your back I kissed him.

He will not say that sorrow is eating my heart out,
nor have my veins been cut by scissors –
that does not mean that he is not thinking it. See me cold and blue.

The leaves fell gently, golden
on the first day
of our autumn,

while the past crackled
beneath our feet,
swept away, forgotten.

Your camera stored our moments,
caught the snowflakes,
froze us in time.

And when they were nearly frostbit,
your hands found home
entwined with mine.

But just when spring returned
my fear formed clouds
of acid rain -

I only knew how
much I'd lost when
silence fell again.

Clear as the summer sky,
I knew that we would
have to part,

so I pressed your final flower
into the notebook
of my heart.

-

The forest clearing
of our autumn
holds nothing at all

but a whispered wish
in golden winds
as the leaves gently fall.

just a little bit o' asbestos
unwrapped from 'round the pipes,
yellow-green arsenic soap
in the bucket to make me clean
to eat... sump'n to munch on
like crunchy lead paint chips
and oh, how i love the smell o'
greasy diesel dip -
it reminds me of my last birthday
when we ate my smoggy cake
the kerosene ran dry that day
and smoked us to the street
our tummy aches that time forsake
'cause doctors cost real money.
but, hey, no choice in winter
- Obamacare or heat -
couldn't type his site with frostbit nubs,
no matter what the hype.
life ain't free,
so as fer me, i doctor fer myself
hell, in 50 years i've seen nothin' yet
some bourbon wouldn't fix.
but never in this tidy place we come to call our poverty
has ever lived the lovely stench
of crisp, green, perfect money.

If cowboy hats had ear muffs,
maybe they would talk more,
though they would hear less.,
caution tossed to the winds howling.

Not for them
the hairy skins of animals
on their bare hair, too much
respect for their sojourners.

Wooly caps are for sailors,
The ones with cutesy ears
hanging down to the shoulders,
popularized by geeks,
adopted by stylish teenage girls,
well, they would rather be frostbit.

Cowboys,
the silent type,
but never quiet, their thoughts are
their stories, eyewitness accounts,
never told under oath, of the truth
about life and death, in the
Great West.

So, no ***** for them
lest they not hear the
noisy silences, cries of the frigid
Great West.

Destroy me
You phantom of a frostbit branch
The window thin as ice but
Thick enough to shut you out, I'd say
To throw a cold shoulder
But you hold the thermostat in your palm
To bade our blades much colder

It falls so softly, induces
Coughing, ravaged throats
Coated in mucus and eucalyptus
And dry as toast
Your accumulation stings.
Builds around my every-thing
Traps me, while you sag on limbs
Sapping at the sight of heat, you
Squelch beneath studded rubber
Soles, and unsuspecting stockings

We react to you in opposites
Sway a daydream tropical
In stiff and childish ways of yours, you drop your toys
Ground to numbing dust
So it falls among the rest of us just waiting
For your twin's return

It's not your choice, to have remains
That soak the grains of greater plains
That lavish in the wreck of your rule.
But to keep the warmth, from coming on
Long after silver bells are gone
Are cold and jealous actions of a fool.