Famished languished fingers reach skyward
As parched sea-salt-dried mouths open
Barely even a whimper escapes into the distance
Bemoaning in unison like gulls calling.

We wished for a future,
Devoid of reality
Avoidant of the derelict
Consumed with digital consumption —
While soiling the very veins of tree roots.

We make gods out of flawed humans
Who sings siren songs or plays the part in plays
Collecting praise and earthy riches,
Gold coin amnesia to sell their bodies for a hit of applause.

Meanwhile, our churches are empty,
The pews collect dust,
No one remembers his name
No one praises in fear or love
It’s pedestrian, mundane, a common act
Meaningless like Valentine’s Day
We took the magic and turned it into paper collage art.

It happened with a crack of the world,
A thunderous voice anguished across black clouds
And strikes of lightning showing enraged veins
And birds, like angels, fell from the heavens,
Crashing upon the rain-stained and wetted soil.

We should have heeded the warning.

As the fires are burning,
Scorching skin to cement
Melding bone to iron rod,
California is lost, gone to the water
Drunk from the ocean,
Sand storms from the Valley of Death
Filling their orifices
Swath away the faithless in a single blow.
And behold the rising of the deep below.

Ashes befoul the air like a rainstorm
Choking oxygen from the lungs,
We bathed in the currents of poisoned waters
And bore children in chimeric horrors,
Cosmic old ones stir under their beds uncomforted
As the earth stirs, and breaks her silence.

Death would be a simple act of grace and mercy
If only to watch along purgatorial veils of fog
As we sing like beached sirens.

A hymn to the skyward palisades
Where no one is there to listen.

Those pictures of me
Are disingenuous images

Blurred from the start
The fuzziness has grown over time

I’m told to see myself
Where can I find a true mirror?

Others say the sounds of me
Are clear and eye-opening

I listen for the sounds inside me
Can sounds ring distinct and genuine

Still much static blurs
The best parts of me

I seek to find silence
To settle into solitude

I engage in deeply
Listening to the uttering of my heart

My heart emits a song
Of the genuine me

I
He has hands and feet now.
And eyes that can close off the world to such a limited view.
  Look at the sun and it is bright,
  Even when the sky shifts to his other sight,
  That warps the fabric of space into view.
  Gravity bends around and around the star burning above,
  Trapping his gaze under its twisting fire.
He forces the vision away, blinking
Once and then twice, then thrice while it lingers.

He breathes in and out
Tucks back a strand of hair glowing red even if there wasn’t light.
Humans see the brightness,
The nameless shade slipping through their thoughts
Slithering down their necks, causing the hair to rise.
When it catches his eye,
When he lets it catch his eye
The dying red star, the one he wasn’t finished slurping down,
Glimmers in those strands of hair.

II
Once, a very long time ago yet so recently in his memory,
There was a hole, gaping and black
Not quite as empty as humans like to pretend that they are.
Stars and planets, bits of rock with life clinging to the surface
Sliding down, down, down what was once a mouth.
That’s all, everything he was, only a mouth to devour.
Until—

His hands clench.
His hands, his feet, his eyes
The mouth closed so very tight
Even if past the lips only round little teeth reside and not
A bottomless abyss.
He might be wrong about that, though
Never could quite build the courage to face a mirror and open wide,
To see if that echoless emptiness still waits inside this carbon-construction of a body.  

He breathes in and out, feels the air slip into lungs
And out again unlike those stars and planets from so long ago.
How was it? How did he become like this?
During that time when his appetite was vast,
Yet he couldn’t have been larger than a drop of ink on a page.
How did he grow, yet become so contained
That the light can strike off this form and not fall into him forever like it did then.

III
There once was an item of science and a priest of old—
The light, the light that doesn’t fall in like the other rays slips its fingers
Into the maw, pulling its jaw open to the point that it
Cracks and realizes that
Its eating, that’s what it—he is doing
That’s all he’s doing, and he wants more
Not more to eat, but more to existing.
And the light pulls out the half-eaten star,
Weaving the red and the orange and the yellow
Into strands that settle past shaking shoulders.

The memory of what he once was presses down upon him as
He wraps his arms around
Those shoulders that only shiver now
Under the weight of boundaries
That keeps the people walking by from falling into him.
He looks back up
Searching for the light that molded him into this shape.
The sun is too dim though, the rays brushing too weakly against his face
To be whatever god forced him into human limbs.