What sordid devotions to identity and strife
Misguided, deranging
Place joy atop a knife

Only through eyes yet unopened
Can the single truth be gleaned
Unbridled, Undivided
Outstanding, Unseen

I checked into the lobby of her one room apartment,
darkened corridor filled with paintings of Jesus.
The fountain throbbed in the hall of this hotel,
shuttered windows,
subtle innuendos,
three knocks.

The night was hot and black,
clothes stuck to our shirts.
The story is about summer and you,
and her dark little island of a room,
and all of her crooked roads,
that had their footprints in my odes.

She was born under the star of Venus, three stars above me.
Her light blue eyes, filled with humbleness, softly saddened.
Her painter's eyes, mercury mouth at the biblical times.
Hair that was colored like wine dark sea fell down on her breast,
on lips that looked like bare roses,
blushing with blood, eating themselves with desire.

I was a wounded soldier, long afloat on a ship less sea.
Deserted and displaced from the war.
A war between the black and white,
A war between the man and the woman.
Utopian infant, Eutopian mother.
Born into this life, thrown into this world.

We entered the darkened room, and purposely didn’t turn on the lights.
She through her house keys and bag on her bed, lit a cigarette.
Offered me one, however he took some of my own.
Looking into her eyes through the smoke, where the moonlight floats.
Lit lamp that was hanging from a distant boat.
Now I saw, there was a painting by Arnold Bocklin hanging on the wall.

spoken word:
A small rowing boat is just arriving at a water gate and seawall on shore.
An oarsman maneuvers the boat from the stern. In the boat, facing the gate, is a standing figure clad entirely in white, a lone loon dives upon the water. Just behind him, there is a festooned object commonly interpreted as a coffin. The tiny islet is dominated by a dense grove of tall, dark cypress and willow trees. The Mephistopheles is just beneath him. As siren grabs him from the of the edge of the boat, underwater.

And she wraps up my tired face in her hair
And she hands me the apple core,
Two birds in a cage, drinking lovers wine and eating bread.

I'll stop in the middle and skip things between me and her. (It comes to us all, soft as a pillow)

The oarsmen has gone
And the loons have flown for cover.
And me I am on trail, in the funeral of my lover.

It’s hard to put into words, the amazing feeling,
you’ve instilled deep inside my weary heart.
I look into your penetrating eyes, and
my passion collides with your emotion.
Is there something different about our union?
Does it feel like a dream come true to you?
This connection that came on all of a sudden,
shocked my heart into a new way of beating.

It took a long time for us to unite, it’s like I fell
for you in just one night.
I feel deep warmth inside of me, which makes
me happy and finally complete.
We saw each other every day, and never
once did I feel this connection.
With autumn approaching and the wind
turning cold, I feel you deeply rooted,
and embedded in my soul.

Space and time fail to confine the inner workings of this extravagant divine.

looked at you for too long
and then i realized
you are human, too

fallible
uncertain
flawed

piously pined for
palatial splendor i
placed in my dreams of you,
imperfect you

and it's no ones fault
a figure headed facade
fabricated by figments
of my frivolous imagination

put you on a pedestal
made you divine
made you holy

you, the ceiling
high above my head
and i, looking up
in the sistine chapel

untouchable
untarnished

couldn't see the cracks
beneath the varnish

then, close enough to study
a faint fresco with critical eyes
fantasy faded in the fault lines
of your frowning face

looked for too long
until i realized
you were just as broken as me

a collection of shattered pieces
shrouded and shy
once a shrine
now a shriek

wide eyes on you
a sinner, still
i called you sacred

ignoring the nature of
the irreverent, the profane

liked the luster
of longing lingering
on my lips
when i breathed your name

the veil torn
the truth beheld
and you are not god

gambling grief and
gleaming gloom
thought i could be
the sun to your moon

majesty to malignancy
momentarily merciful
moreover cruel

monstrous mr monsoon
after all, human, too

Under the Babylonian sea
Lives a place hid from you and me
And in this place, broken in two in the sand,
Known as a fault line cursing the land,
Is the place where we return again.

You and me, citizens of the earth - we’re people from the center of
The earth
And we search out to the stars
To try and find our birth.
All while the truth lies under our feet.
But don’t ask me.
This is the mystery you see.
The mystery of me.

Not to make the story all revolve around me,
But I lived for lifetimes as nature’s pulse,
A most high pixie maintaining the roses,
All the little vines and terraces,
And I was whimsical and wise
And greatly cherished.
I lived to be about a thousand years,
And died of self-sacrifice
In 2005.
As our planet grew more and more technical,
Avoiding the organic, skeptical,
It was for a simple reason:
The present goes in two directions.
The present goes forward and
The present goes backward.
And somewhere in between
We have our fate,
Our choices.
Free will drives this place.
Don’t think too much of gravity
Or relativity.
Free will is the ingredient in this Universe
Holding it all together.

So the extraterrestrials that guard this planet,
They guard like a gourd
Rotting on a hot Saturday.
They guard like a hound
Pitched on a chain
To its little box of a house.
They guard like an abusive stepfather.
Like they are the way.
And I know them.
They killed all the mermaids,
When I reigned as Queen.
That is for another tale,
Or tail?
I forget what sort of humor is
Current at this age,
But puns are a sign of great wit,
So with them, I’ll spit.

I reigned as Queen of the Mermaid people and indeed all of the people. I reigned when there were humanoids
Similar to you, but stouter.
It was before your race mated with
My race.
We raced
Towards death.
You captured my people with the utmost brutality.
I see it done to my cousins,
The porpoises and whales,
And it hurts me
To see it happen again.
You stab these creatures in their blowholes,
Just like you stabbed my sisters
And eventually, me,
In our wombs.
The pregnant ones howled the loudest.
You brutally desecrated my people.
You did it again on the land
To the people we were most connected to,
The original tribes of North America.
And not that it’s you, people of the land.
I am one of you.
That will not change in this lifetime.
As Earth Mother for a thousand years
I obtained the Earthly information,
The muscle memory
Of the plants.

We call it a planet
And terra,
Like Mother Earth is a plant.
We see her as affectionate
And beautiful,
But some has seen her wrath.
She shakes,
She fears the madness
That lives on her skin,
And burrows into her,
Deeper and deeper,
Searching for her heart.
But I, as Queen fairy,
Took the honor
Of self-sacrifice
And took her heart
And hid it
In an average baby girl.
Will she realize her goddess heritage?
Wiped her mind and by-passed the sacred
Earth Mother heart.

Baby girl grows up in Babylon.
The chances of her
Freeing her Beast
Are as low as it goes.
Half of the pixies wept
Half of the pixies cheered.
Then they chose sides
And the positions, they veered.

i was an insect
on a divine windshield
a speck of dust
on an otherwise stainless garb
when wiper blades swept me down
in my infancy
a young brood
i am guts
i am blood
i am gross things