Cast in gloom by unstirred night,
Set in shade by hellish light,
The hours expend their restless plight
Upon my weary, arctic eyes.

And no soothing turns of fitful head
Can transgress to sleep within this bed,
For to shelter thin my heart's been led
By an angel with fluorescent eyes.

It is sleep for which my body pleads
But from taunting dreams I do recede
For fear and dread within them breed
Fear of vacant, careless eyes.

What once was filled with pleasantries
Cascades forthwith to miseries
And in each eye where once was love
Reside two empty sarcophagi

Phantoms parade their blustry gowns
And taunt me with their golden crowns
Memories mix with unlived lies
Behind their lucid, ghostly eyes

And when I find the rest I need
It greets me like an evil ****
It passes by and leaves its seed
Of tortured, lurid, silent eyes.

They salute the setting sun-
The invocation of eternity in a dark glass bottle
Colored in by the furious scribbling of a black marker
Always on the verge
Of empty;

To the dull cacophonous squeak that erupts from the tip of that thing,
Irate in its placid path towards obscurity,
Censoring the callous morning light from refracting
Into the chasms of some finitely empty infinitum
Otherwise dedicated as the blunder of nomenclature:

Reality.

But to the muted and forlorn residue of the aforementioned,
The fiery chill blazing down upon fair human hearts,
Only meek eyes and ears perceive You in Your squandered state,

Your quiet quintessence,

Your opaque perfection.

Shine on, though I beg!
For even this obfuscating cherubim
Is depraved,
And wicked,
And lacking substance
To combat they who stand aside from the narrow mouth of that empty bottle
Where emptiness becomes palpable while beauty has no form;

Shine!
Luxuriate the few and linger not on the fearful and ignorant,
Scintillate and commiserate with us,
With them,
With those you find and who find you--

Do not confuse yourself with
God!

For God is in the bottle

And God is the marker!

Confess your presence in our souls--give a name to what we cannot
So that when we wake we find no compartment for our passions, no boundaries of love-

Roaming freer than the dancing light made pale by that blasphemous credence of philosophy awry.

The ocean tried to bear the sun,
And with brevity
It caught aflame-
It lit the world on fire.

But water is not made to burn.
So rose the Titan,
So came the day,
So crashed the waves away.

And it sung, and it sung, and it
Fell from the sky

But to see a star crawl from the sea
Will leave a mystery:
Who, far away, is there to greet the sun,
Before it returns to me?

Perhaps no one waits, like me,
And it lays to rest-unaccompanied.

Surely, though, another sees!
Another soul rejoices,
To see a giant fall from high
Like heaven to its knees

And if no love for him remains
Always will there be-
An ocean, in some reverie,
To swallow up the Sun.

The ocean tried to bear the sun,
And with brevity
It caught aflame-
It lit the world on fire.

And down burned the earth,
Charred to the soil,
To the soul of all things
Till everything was bare

Down came the buildings, the cities,
The structure-
Even the intangible ideas of man-

Fluttering scorched and tattered.

And in that moment of terror
There exists no greater peace
For when everything we know is dead
Everything we've lost is new

And outward it can grow,
Without the weight of men
To anchor it like concrete walls
To concrete chords and souls

But this moment, however brief,
Greets us every day,
It rolls right by and we forget
That someday man will burn too bright.

Golden light erupts
From beneath the earthen sea
Slowly pouring up,
Entrancing and caressing
It forever bears me home

Two pine trees in the snow
On the bank of a shimmering pool
Are forever photographed in my memory,
In the space within my skull
And as I recall, I draw them out
Not in reality
But to a place where you and me
Can find and fall to desperate love
To where kings and lovers go.
And beneath the arms of evergreen,
In our land of glass and snow,
We'll plant two seeds of memory
And forever they will grow
Till the day they brush the clouds above
And sweep them to the side
Forthwith will shine the brightest light-
Illuminate what once was night
And before it's hidden once again
Behind that glowing white
Our light will show to those who ask
Just how high two trees can grow.

Are all of my desires and all my preconceptions
Derived from the same human pallet?
If I retreat into my soul to find originality
Will I emerge only with something of communality?
When I wake up and forget my dream
How many more are plagued by fleeting memories?
In the end of it all am I just one more slave
In a sea of vile, servile conformity?
Does the individual have the energy
To mean something in the masses?
My greatest fear is to be defined by the parameters of ancestry
And even though I plan to be forgotten long before time has smothered me,
I will be the one to ask
And the only one to know:
Who am I? I am me.

In the winter stands a tree
Its branches withered swords
And here it weeps eternally
For the coldness in its cords.
And if you ask its birds to sing,
They will laugh and cry and call you names
But not one note will ring.

In the springtime sprout its leaves
With flowers purple orange and green
But where melodious harmony should conceive
Still the birds they do not preen.
And if you ask the birds to fly
They will flap and fall and curse your name
And leave you with another sigh.

In heat and love and summer rain
Trails the vestige of a tortured king,
And at his fingers and in his veins
Pumps a sap so aptly named.
And if you ask the birds to dance
They'll stumble jest and fall at best
But not a one will prance.

In the dying, brittle autumn breeze
Sway the heavy dreadful barren things
Of a trunk infused with sad disease
That brings to ground those with wings.
And if you ask the birds to leave
They'll squawk and say, “but here, we're kings!”
And forever you will see the reeve.

But if you ask the birds about the tree
They'll look around so nervously
And out of key and harmony
They'll tell you how they killed her gracefully

Now ask the willow why she weeps,
Why she cries herself to dreary sleep;
She'll just wave her withered fingers low
To some mesmeric ancient flow.

But you need no explanation
For the dead decayed and dying--
Silence is the song of passion's passing beauty.

In my room the wind blows strong
against the old glass panes above my head,
its whistle stripped of the pitch and the sting,
becoming a soft caress of my cheek,
reassuring me that an ocean of air
still stirs just inches past my bed.

These walls keep out the world for me
so I can dream of it at night,
as the songs of the past day
sow reflections through those ripples in the air.

Or, sometimes they don’t and the current grows still
and the space beyond these walls seems empty and bare,
like the universe packed up and left me behind
and the house only creeks because the wind has stopped holding it up.