I am stone  
impenetrable and rigid in my moorings  
duty bound to be -  
the foundation for feet and  
dreams that stack each brick atop me in  
false hopes that I will withstand time  

the weakness inside me mining out my ores  
each one chiseled and dug out until  
the vein is bled dry  
a cavern made by the relentless drip of everything i am not  
filing the space between my skin with nothing and  
praying that my seams will hold me together  

I am fine

Sharp as an edge that does not ask what it is cutting.  
whole as a thing that does not need proof to exist,
thought arrives in full motion before meaning—
color before shape, light before weight,
not as process, not as method,
but truth already formed, unwilling to be held,
which needs no tending, refining,    

It is not a single stroke, a mark left in color.  
It is a corridor of light bending toward a vanishing point,  
a figure suspended in the breath between surrender and flight,  
a mouth parted—not in speech, but in revelation.  

It is an ocean poured into the shape of a body.  
It is a body without weight,  
held between the living and the remembered,  
flesh turned to pigment, pigment turned to memory.  

But thought is a language without translation.  
A thing seen without being rendered.  
It lives complete until the body interferes.  

Lift the brush.  
Already the destruction begins.  

The stroke was not supposed to be a stroke.  
It was supposed to be the collapse of sky.  
It was supposed to be the sound of a name  
spoken for the last time.  
It was supposed to mean something that words do not hold—

a woman made of light, moving without movement,
She is not illuminated by it, but shaped by the silence.  
She is made of it, pressed against its shifting edges,  
her figure stretching into the dusk behind her,  
her outline bleeding at the edges, the last smear of a dream.
a composition of gold and violet,  
her hands lifted not in greeting, but in knowing.  

Yet, what arrives is not what was imagined.  
It thickens where it should have unraveled,  
it bends where it should have stretched,  
it hesitates where it should have declared.  
the perfect thought impossible to render
that does not belong to canvas, to translation,  
the body’s limited means of making.

She moves too fast, escapes too easily,  
is undone in the visible, can not be held.
She will die in the weight of execution.

He will bury her, mourning and living
with the reality that her beauty
can only wholely be seen by him.

How could I love like that again
When I pour all of my heart into you
How could I love like that again
When I wasn't enough for you

Grain soaked in salt spray
Yet firm beneath the feet,
Find reasons for best salvation
The second ship scuttled
So, then, stand a third.
         A fourth.

Halted in haploid afterglow
A single heritage, halted ambition.
One path to a keystone past
Tethered to the tossing waves.

In your heart the hardest rains;
a springtime tempest made of weapon-weather

The whale's road you wander,
Searching for slumbering reasons;
I name you "Somnambulist."
Asleep in the dreaming, but weakened awake.

Ghosts and beasts know--both aware of your diploid scheming
Two paths to ******* dreaming
Twin protrusions in fate's firm fist
And deepest waters crash and strike
against smallest frames, the quivering wave oak.

Each one alone among the swan-way's waves.
Same way as in wending through life.
              Just as in dying

Coca-Cola launched their 'New Coke' forty years ago.
When Coca-Cola did this, it turned out to be a fiasco.
They launched their 'New Coke' in April of 1985.
It was not a success and it certainly didn't thrive.
Coca-Cola abandoned the old formula and released the new.
Millions of people were angry and some even threatened to sue.
When it came to the 'New Coke', it was something that most people hated.
Coca-Cola started making the original again because people were devastated.

"Will I make it?"
the heart cries.

A thousand tries,
yet I fall.

"Should I lower my expectations?"
it whispers.

"No, it's not over until you win,"
the mind insists,
like night cradles the sky;
light will come soon.