the decision
to celebrate my birthday
with you

a dinér a deux
with good cabernet

food for thoughts

one step
on the way to you
   and to myself

after long years
of almost obsessively
taking care
   of the world

       * *

i'm not okay
but it's easier to lie

Breathe.
It's only for a time.
Breathe.
Do not let the tears spill out.
Breathe.
But they laugh and laugh and *laugh and I cannot handle their hands on each other and their smiles turned away from me and the complicity they share I am so
alone
In a sea of people
I put 5 plates
On a table and I am the odd one
Out.
I stare straight at the wall.
But they laugh and laugh and laugh and do not realize we are in a different universe.


**I am the 5th plate.

Something obscures my sight, it may be a sign of the times or the night, but I can't see too clearly, my vision is best used when I'm looking back and the tracks that I trade are like beacons which made the fires that show the way on.

I walk with the weight of some years on my frame and each year bears the name of the one gone before, if each year was a door to go through then I went through them all, not remembering when but there must have been ink in my pen somewhere along the trade of the track, looking back it's all clear and that was the end of one more time of year, one more falling tear, one more thing to fear, but it's only at times when these things bring to mind the unfortunate apocalypse into which slips the man.

I can make a wish, but I can't find the lamp if I could I would wish that I wasn't this ***** that tramps back through the years and it all ends in tears yet again I still look for some words or a book to console me when the thing that obscures my sight holds on and controls me.

Anyway,
the day has been judged and found wanting more weight,
the scaffold's been built, but my sight is of late getting worse and
it's harder to see if it's me with a rope
or the last vestige of hope,
waving goodbye.

your silence is deafening, darling.
pour me another cup of misunderstanding
and i'll chug it down to ease
the choking passage of razors through my throat,
the singe of blood soaked vocal chords.
the emptiness of your bones
has propelled me to project ancient tomes
to consume hollowness, to color in absence.
i have cued all the thunderstorm songs
and i'm humming along in watery refrain
sluggishly off beat and out of key
to keep the fog from suffocating me.
there was a roaring fire
that's been smothered
by the vacuuming of oxygen.
void swallows void,
fantasy births ghoulish reality.
the moon stands half mast tonight,
stars falling as tears into the sea,
flooding tidal waves rolling over, over
churning lost hands up to hold a choppy surface.
forsake all promises
but cherish me, still.
love takes her last steps off a jagged cliff
and into an etherial hell.