Each purposed smear narrates
The poised faked fire of tears recent abated
Daubed pigments interlacing to store traces
Of gut-deep betrayals worn on lying skin
The never-before retraced in stain & tint
The sour taste of imagined sins
Rose-tainted views feign caught hate

Incapable d'agir. De quoi parlent-ils tous?
Est-ce encore un livre, la perte de ses pages?
Où que l'on creuse, là n'est pas la source;
Déduira-t-on ainsi qu'elle est introuvable?

Écoutant les murmures au travers du ciment
Encore qui mugissent des propos absurdes;
Puis d'une jointure, l’on cognera dedans:
« Encore et toujours vide, l'écho ridicule. »

Criant au secours, qu'on leur vienne en aide;
Celui de tout perdre, connait-on le sacrifice?
C'est donnant ainsi tout qu'enfin l'on nous cède
Le vrai pour et contre l'artifice.

Incapable d'agir. Que racontent-ils donc?
Lorsqu'ouvrir la bouche est un pas de trop,
À la course ils se ruent vers les fronts:
« Cette inertie qui maintient en sursaut. »

En ouverture vers le vide, voici le message
Des parois décousues d'un fort abyssal:
« Écouter le silence, le silence qui n'entend rien. »

My fingers tap against the keyboard. The stars linger above my cross-legged, country trance spilling across the indigo campfire sky. Jasmine ransacks my senses dazing my context of the red, wooden bridge, and my head tilts upward both in flowering pleasure and earnest reverence. The stars become you. We bathe in naked sunlight. The heavens fall to earth, and I capture its ecstasy  in bodiless waking moments.

No one can bear
With poise and grace
The truth laid bare
Before their face

So stories reign
In highest court
Defying reason
And wise retort

Myths filter light
So eyes can see
The truth too bright
For you and me

Slanted truth is better
Than blindness, after all
But when falsity’s untethered
Soon cometh the fall

Mr Smith had never thought about

The fake flowers on the drawers.
That beauty which makes death feel ignored,
But looks unripe in any vase
And isn’t right for wedding cars -

Their petals never sought to solve
His seven word soliloquy.
There’s no rose bed on recovery
When after all, she loves him not.

He knows it from their scrutiny,
That untimely unchapped litany
That blush of plush longevity
Adored; while he withers.

Mr Smith’s preferred were pansies,
For ‘their faces crumpled under sunlight’,
He’d shuffle stems like decks; green necks
To warm and sweeten death.

The pansies were his calendar -
Life measured against death
Kept his watches ticking;
The thirsty amber skins were pages comprised

Of how he hated plastic petals
With a pale and putrid pith,
Their purpleness was slothful
And their pulchritude a myth

Of mocking murmurs mumbling
Memories -
As insipid as the very falseness
Binding up their limbs -
Of the August day in ‘54
When the fake flowers on the drawers
Were white against her whiter brow -
As perfect then, as they are now.