I went to the circus when I was thirteen;
Everything was turkus,
All in a rurkus,
And my body brought me to an automated teller machine.

Its face was a gypsy, but there wasn't something quite right;
Then I became real tipsy,
I saw smoking hippies,
And when I woke, I couldn't find my parents by a long sight.

The circus, the circus had closed down.
Besides the ghosts, I was the only one in town,
And the only thing left was a rusted old crown.

5194 the history book told me.
Nothing could solve this, there was no key,
And so I let me dreams take me to the sea.

When I awoke, I wakened with a jolt;
I was under a cheastnut oak,
Covered in a velvet cloak,
And everything was normal, just as it was supposed to be.

Artificial city-dwellers
Discard all humanity
Carbon fired tin cans
Pierce the serenity.

Anonymous collisions
Fifty floors below
Each passer by a stranger
You will never know.

Pedestrians, travellers
And their vehicles
Droplets in a river,
Altering the tidal flow.

Irrigation passages
Absorb the elements
Hedge fund panellists,
Bankers and workers flee.

Eye rolling baby boomers
Sit, tutting one by one.
Nervous millennials adorned
In clothes for moths to eat.

Breaking point carriages
Century old tunnelling
A lone foot tapping
And quiet page turning.

Brakes hit the track
Piercing the murmur
Eighty jarred necks
External motion blur.

Sliding carriage doors
A not-so-subtle beep
Dust kicked from dawn
Falls onto the city streets.

Blue tower inhabitants
Busting out of the seams
Water molecules collide
But nothing sinks the fleet.

Smartly suited eye-darters
Push and pull for space
Rolling up the banks
Humanity erased again.

I settle on the brickwork
Until the storm retreats
Circadian commuters
Run to rest their feet.

A few lonely meanders remain
Wondering down the beach
Forlorn festivies fog over
Swinging shop-signs squeak.  

As the lighting rig descends
And once blue ceiling stains
The beige brickwork turns red
The high tide admits defeat.

Pink light turns to navy blue
A faint moonbeam lights the sky
Obscured by one cloud then a few
Vague incandescence frames the scene.

The streetlights flicker overhead
One worn out passenger now leaves
Shrouded, cold, hungry and fulfilled;
Abandonment for some is peace.

The thing about inseparability is that you spend so many sleepless nights trying to familiarize yourself with each and every reason he named the arrangement of those walls "home" and when you finally leave (the candy bowl, the green Christmas lights, the keyboard, the twin size mattress, the bathroom cabinet),
Kenopsia lies in the forgotten combination code and you're left blankly staring at your front door and the splinter in your foot from the plywood floor and the unexpectedly obnoxious ding of the microwave and the look on your moms face when you have to ask which forks are in which drawer and when your cat paws at your tangled headphones but runs when you try to pet her and you remember that she is actually a he and you had to change his name because Matilda wasn't unisex enough for your niece, who's been making all A's in school, no thanks to you, even after the help you promised her was never provided, much like the bowling nights and painting mornings you once planned with her.
And you can't sleep at night because your arms aren't flexible enough to wrap themselves around your torso and rest beneath your neck like his did and your bed makes an unfamiliar screech each time you toss or turn or stretch, or blink, or take a breath and the light can't be turned off with a click of a button and the room is too cold without a radiating body next to you to fill the frigid air with warm words about running toward city lights, and you realize that you've dreamed of a home your entire life and you thought you'd never found it and maybe you still haven't but you've built a structure with his bones and use his curls as blankets,
but what the three little pigs didn't warn you of was that all it takes is a cloudy day to birth a storm strong enough to rip the ribs off their hinges.
The storm hasn't hit home yet, but it's almost hurricane season, and you can't remember where your dad always hid the flashlights from your niece; and light is shed on the fact that darkness houses vulnerability.

I went back
But, my mind wandered
Off to seek a haven
Where this pieces would fit

Those were the only days
Where I was a statue
And not a godforsaken flesh
In a straitjacket

Parents,
Are the place where you go
As a storm coming in
Heading your way
Wreaking you over,
Bashing your reality,
Being an acid in your little lemon life,
They are the white limbo
You heart wants to go
Are not they?

I am at the place
Where I gauge the years to empty
Where it is dark
Where it is white
Where no roses grow
Where no crows caw
Where my heart vacant,
A kenopsia
(Turning the page)
(I turn the page)

What is home?

A room
usually
so full of people
How they feel and see
How they tread through with emotions as company
Bustling with energy so much to take in
Now abandoned left aside
No room for all these people
Mind is of own
Form shapes a steeple
More now
inclined to connect
with
spirit or self alone
Less noise
Open space
in
solitary
and
silence

And as the tides rolled in

Sun peering at us at she woke

The dark lights falling away

I peered over my shoulder


To your alabaster image.

Caution tape where
Children once played, once laughter,
Now only kenopsia.

The end of the calendar draws near
to close to this bitter-strange year.

March was marked by a quiet,
No parades, drinking or revelry

to mishonor of our country's patron
Saint. Silence gripped the land, I float

though a ghost-town
and feel the kenopsia
of society abandoned.

Spring blew into summer
which passed quickly to
fade in the fall as winter
begs darkness, inevitable.

October was dead, no signs
of life save the reappearance
of some old friends, symptoms
of the muse. The annual festivities

were quite subdued, and it will surely
be a questionable New Year. Luckily
a shooting star crossed my sky as I

cycled home on the estival solstice.
For me that marked the end
of the year two-thousand-and-twenty,