[i]

No soaring pain could match her, draped across a dying flame.
Like cinder,
                    she whisper-whistled through lungs thin, teeth sallow,
a promise in song.

“Towera jinner mulbeena,
Poodinyoober mulbeena.”
        
    It was a good promise;
    belonged to everyone
                                   and wouldn’t change for Tomorrow’s ranges.
It asked for nothing
but patience and faith.
                          From where she lay,
                                              the trees, gums, were akimbo.

[ii]

                          For generations she had walked, through the wettest of wets and driest of dries.
       With hope in her ribs and a nature savage and pure.
                     You could break her, throw her to the cockatoos,
                                                      ­And yet, ***** and punctured,
                                                 like driftwood, she would drift back,
                                                           ­                                                                Blossoming in your lap again.

[iii]

                      When the kangaroos have done their dance
                                                 in the twilight.
There she'd been.
Supine. Broken open and
lily-white (on the inside).

                                                  
    ­                                        and we did this.
                            with our prospecting and land grabbing

                                      we did this,
                      with our parking lots and Starbucks cup

         she was dismembered, priced, "loved," owned.
                    
                                     discarded.
                                            to the meek edge
                                       of an eternal flame ****** to embers.

The heros were at a crossroads once again,
But a much different one from the time before,
This one was one where they had not been,
And one they would end up not all traveling along the same path.

The Drummer and the Bassist pleaded for the Frontman to see reason,
That the path he chose only would lead to ruin,
But with the spider whispering its words their pleas fell upon deaf ears.

It is here that the Frontman struck it out alone,
Feeling betrayed upon their refusal to join him on this path.

He was alone now,
With only the spider for company,
Too blinded to it all to realize the dangers upon the road he went.

As time went on,
The days grew long,
And the struggle for The Frontman grew ever greater.

Feeling adrift in time,
Without a map or compass,
The spider ensnared him further still.

It whispered wicked things,
Full of malice and hate,
Corrupting the Frontman wings,
A cruel arrow shot through him by fate,
A great gift tainted by the spiders poison.

Like a volcano that lay dormant,
For so long it seemed almost forgot,
But after too long it exploded,
The target of it all were those that were adorant,
Tearing asunder all that it sought.

Maybe I'm not a good writer
Maybe I'm not that talented
Maybe there's no one who's interested in these combined phrases
Maybe it's only me I can become
But lemme ask you this, people
What does really matter?
Does it really matter to be good af?
Does it really matter to be **** talented?
Does the number of supporters really matter?
Listen to me, does it really matter?
Or does it only really matter to you?
Yes, probably the latter is true
Because you, society, requires everyone to please you
You requires everyone to be the way it satisfies you
You stole everybody's happiness
You stole everybody's reality
You stole everybody's identity
Laugh out loud for the irony
Because that "everybody" is the same society itself
Listen to me, can you please stop being that society to someone
To someone like me...

Objective upon objective,
They stack one upon the other,
Higher and higher indeed,
Until a snag scrubs it entirely away.

A new stratagem was needed,
A long term goal to help better align the rest of your life,
But steps must be taken,
And too soon they always pile up,
And the stratagem must be cast away.

This continues onwards,
Farther and farther,
Leaving The Frontman awash in an ocean of grey.

Oh, you have been so lovely and so lost
While May arrived to purple flowers,
Moisten lilies and the early roses show. But no
Skimmering of joy leapt up to gild the glory of those flowers.
Martins built (so suddenly they came)
And all the swallows, too,
But elegies made cloudy dimness glow in heaven’s blue,
And then the pageant May descanted Katharine,
And Katharine’s untrue.

Kathy, lately
birds seem rarer.
Even in the lilacs
where the blackbird whistles,
boughs seem spent.
Foolish men who read their loss in nature’s
always wax too eloquent,
so, while I try to paint
a sense of desolation
in the brooks of heaven and streams of night
(wherever they may be),
I know it’s farce –
an enterprising manufacture making nothing laugh.

I should write nothing,
nothing makes more sense,
although, my darling,
when I mourn for you who travelled hence
(and left me, placing nothing in my arms)
my mind drifts out,
and like a fragment driven by the wind,
I have to write.
I have to wring these vague alarms.
I have to give to nothing something slight.

You are no longer smiling
In the garden stacked with afternoons,
Your skirt above your knees,
Gloating and scorning my wish for modesty,
While roses are sticking themselves to bees
And sun is setting on coffee spoons,
A lifted skirt, your knees.

My darling, now when you never smile
In that garden without a fair,
When those peculiar stretches of petals
Are memories better forgotten, being bare,
I can still see you walking across that lawn
And turning to me with dark, extravagant beauty
And your secret held into you like an impossible dawn.

Knowing you hated me then and hate me now,
Knowing you called me “Horror” for a reason, every day,
What point in writing an elegy
That mourns the spurious and grieves for the grey,
Dissolution of love, the continuity of deceit,
Light in the stocks
And modesty peeping out of your socks

If not to celebrate something more
Than everything you were or can ever have been,
Something more because you made me seem
More than myself and surrounded my heart
With so many somber and beautiful dreams
That life grew riotous
Springing the lids of tombs?

The door was open
After all I needed was
A soft and slight push

Embracing concrete
A blanket of brittle stone
Never seemed so soft

Vividly coloured
Petals fill the crimson marks
Of blood-splattered streets

For I never longed
The eternal rest of mind
In sheer discretion