Cupid, you foulest of the archers
How you lodge your arrows deep
It is like a fire burning my heart
And I have no room to bleed
Apollo archer of poetry
Please pierce this dart in my chest
That I might write this poem in blood
And with fatal words, confess
She never loved me at all
And I have no reason to persist

Athena turned ’round her head
like a night owl on the sly
and looked up behind her
as gold Apollo crossed the sky,

riding with his four coursers’
flying gilded manes and hooves.
Their silver flanks and quarters
thunder across the earth’s blue roof.

The rhythm of their beat
stamps a lyric all their own,
blood coursing with the heat
of the sun-disk they all towed.

The she-god of the wise
observes this cloud-streaked scene,
the man-god shining out,
casting shadows ’round Athene.

Apollo’s path is sinking low
as the winter months advance.
The frost now blurs his glow
and bare forests fall into trance.

It’s in this creeping night
that Athena finds her time.
She draws her wisdom in twilight,
no need for blinding light up high.

For she shines not with a sun.
Instead she lights her own pathway.
By her craft and wits she’ll run
her own trail she blazed today.

My hands that reeked of death.
I was stained before I knew.
What it meant,
What loss entailed.

I was different once,
Now I'm different too.
The loving gaze,
Reached me from the stars.

One faithless day.
I watched me die.
What I could've been if I never knew.
You stared at me like the gravel.

I laid to rest,
All my innocence.
The light inside me,
Snuffed before it could form.

The cold metallic taste now stuck,
Clinging onto me.
Like nothing ever will.
Because I will always reek of death.

And I will mourn for you.
For what I could have been.
Your life that had only just begun,
Pretending that it was enough.

You will never know what it is, to stop.
-Persephone

For the first time in months,
I prayed
Before my statue of Apollo,
I kneeled
With my candle lit
I held my open palms to the sky
I cried
Before Apollo,
I begged
For the first time in months,
I had to believe
There was something beyond me
That could bring you what you need

Karim disintegrates
To the madness of the Brightest Star
In the fog-thickened day.

That star,
Empowered with the strength of a
Thousand soldiers
And their passion,

And the cunning wit
Of the Great Apollo,

Stretched the fabric of linear veil to pause
The illusion of society

For a moment

Outside of dementia

It would be when the air would feel like silk or like the hues were almost brighter.
It was when the hills felt lower and the low felt lighter.
In the speckles of day when I would sing to the tune of another’s brass,
Somehow my daydreams would still hold a conversation with you.
You’d saunter in with kindness and class;
The kind of attitude that sometimes I wish I had.
Your tone and diction were hard to imagine,
They lacked the luster and the passion.
They were all the corridors to every phrase.
They were all the oddities I wanted to praise.
I can feel the wax melt from my wings with just the thought of knowing you in abundance.
You are a Sun to my sand with a depth I should never learn.
You’re a distance that feels relaxed and at a level I could never convince.
At your hand would I bloom into my hyacinth petals or would my roots begin to rot?
Would I compliment your warmth by offering a place to rest or would my minerals begin to harden into a glass for my next cathedral?
It’s necessity the keeps the unknown locked in a mental maze that which I have mending to wrought.
Still, my stargazing will end when I fall.
Those feathers left to remind me of how little about you I’ve ever actually known;
And yet how bittersweet to imagine having ever flown.

Passing through mid-century
these jazz oneironauts reached Apollonian heights
while society drifted into Dionysian drunkenness
the merchants caught on too soon
The most beautiful parts of humanity
enamored to serve the ugliest:
The merchant class, the bourgeoisie
Buddha’s undeserving in charge
If only in past centuries
those noble princesses embraced
even more lowly patronages
all this potential today could be staved off
Saved from the drive to be commodified
People stopped buying jazz as it reached its height
No more smiles to appease the whites
Jazz for the few
the noble, the individual in the know

Until this too becomes the simulacrum
The Ornette Coleman on the bookshelf
to signify your snootiness
your refinement from wealth
Aging Dads in thousand dollar sweaters
kicking out their 22 year old kids
for being ****** addled hipsters
meanwhile Bird on Verve is nodding out
and Dad’s girlfriend pops a Percocet
to deal with all the stress