when you make learning the goal
the world opens up
into a fantastic phase
of color and light

light's not quite the weight though
and color bleeds through
cause they don't pay the rent
they don't keep the gas

so a lot of us close the books
putting the pen down
with faux intent to one day, pick it back up
but that day's never coming

the years, they draw in on you
and responsibility bears down on you
the person you thought you'd become
is replaced with the one you did

but you can always make a change

Ancient Seat of Versailles
Sweet shimmering palace
Place of majestic mirrors
Reflect the grand beauty you store
So that each vision
Is distorted and deformed
Yet still retains the brilliance
Of picturesque perfection
Like Capitalism unsoiled
Or Socialism Unspoiled
A duet of ideas
Promising the good life
The great life
Heaven, before it was hardened
By revolutionaries of reality

Brave
And shaking
And strong
And quaking

I fool myself
Late at night that is
With fantastical scenoirios
Of what may be

Yes
Yes I see
Late at night
Who I want to be

A version of myself
Trapped inside
My head
A fantastical version

A prototype
A clone
An upgrade
Trapped

Picturing confident conversation
Loose chest breathing easily
Fantastical
It feels fantastical

Then I wake up
The feeling gone
The fantastical locked up again
In my tight chest

Anxious and hard to breath
My tight chest and immovable mind
A constant cage
For that fantastical me

All day I think
How different every situation
Would be
With fantastical me

She screams from inside
The tight chest, running mind cage
I hear her scream
She is me

Well a version of me
No one will ever see
We argue all day
But she never wins the fight
She's only allowed to dream at night.

The knowledge of her death kills a piece of me.
I sit, light blaring at the page, hoping for her to wake up.
I sit, hoping this is all just some terrible hallucination she is having.
My stomach twists as I see his face in my head.
Him, the one that learned how to love her, then lost her.
Sadness, guilt and pity swirl through my body.
I can only imagine the deep pain and loss he is feeling.
All of it is to savior for me to bear
I laugh whipping away my tears
This is silly.
I have watched them from a far this entire time.
Their faces are made up,
Constructed, sculpted, from the words that burn into my eyes.
Yet I feel this pain,
This pain I feel in my being must be the same pain that he feels now,
Staring at her life less body
Limp,
Gone.
I want to lunge at the paper
I want to scream, cry, and laugh.
This is twisted
I hate it for sending me to this emotional place,
But I can’t help but continue,
Loving the action and thrills it sends along the ride.
Her death kills a piece of me.
-ALC

I’m sitting in a lawn chair
At the edge of the moon’s well cratered chest
I’m facing a woman whose company is pricy and measured by rounded hours
She sits full lotus
Supple legs twist in a curving swirl
Seated on the glass surface of the coffee table
Young and slight enough to have no rational fear of it shattering beneath her

I ask to ask her something
She simpers
Anything
So I begin my slurred inquiry
If there was a God
And
And it told you that
Today was the day you would die
But it would spare you and let you live on well
Well
Into old age if you could give a good reason why
It should let you live then
What would your reason be
I belch a pig’s roar
What would your reason be

She simpers again
Ooooh **** that’s a good question
She toys with the starched mass of her hair
Flailing to be remembered by me and gain another loyal customer

I guess
I guess I’d say that I had a daughter and
Do
You have a daughter
She’s nineteen at the oldest
Yesss I do
I blink
What’s her name
Her name is Nelly
So
So you’d say you had a daughter and
And that she needs me
She loves me
I love her
I can’t leave her alone

In the center of the dark and lashed ellipses that halo her hazel eyes
I’m finally seeing a woman

She tilts her face
Her bangs silk to her jawbone
What would your reason be

I unscrew my flask

I wouldn’t give one
I deserve to die
However
Luckily for me
This life is unfair and unjust
In reality
You can plead to God all you want but even if it hears you
It won’t stop what it’s already made
And what it’s made is death

We’re both still facing each other
But we’re not looking at each other anymore
We’re both staring at space’s unfathomable darkness
The all consuming black

I know from where she is
She can see the Earth
She can see the spins of white puff
The emerald and umber chunks
The deep sapphire that coats the planet’s skin
Maybe she’s thinking of Nelly

From where I sit
All I can see are the tiny scabs of distant stars
Moth bites
In an all swallowing cloak

I check my watch
My current bill is approximately 1,600USD
I hear her voice
For the first time today
Her voice is genuine and entirely naked
Are you saying that God doesn’t save anyone

The weight of the knife in my pocket
Feels heavier than it should be
Especially here
The craters of the moon are yawning wide
They’ve always made perfect graves

I drink the last gulp of bourbon from my flask

Before I answer her
I wonder if her question is also asked by the others
The high piled and shallow buried
Crisscrossing one another
Overlapped like piles of pottery pieces
Or shards of shale
They lie
Trapped on the sun’s mirror
Lifelessly embracing and lying upon each other
Coincidently kissing each others wounds
Stuffed in the stony rings of the craters of the graying moon

Some I left floating in lakes
Both here
And back on Earth

Are they all wordlessly asking each other
Screaming through sunken faces
Won’t God save us
Doesn’t God save anyone

I toss my flask to the side
It takes forever to fall

Well
Charlotte
As far as I’m concerned
He hasn’t saved anyone yet

dark hair

light eyes

tone fit body

he’s a perfect guy

smart with wit

this is it

I can say

please take me away

to this man

with a freckling tan

he’s beautiful

and says what’s right

he’s wonderful

take me away for the night

*…sometimes I’m taken over in butterflies

for a perfect guy with light green eyes

the butterflies bubble, dawdle, build up
homes underneath the skin, as she looks at him
as he looks at him
as she looks at her
as they look to each other

cocooning between blood vessels and pulses
their wings spread as intoxication, renovation
hands reach up
for him
for her
and stars are plucked and presented

they are the stars that first looked around the space
and came to rest, upon the ignorant, beautiful breast
of him, of her
from his eyes
from her eyes
and they glitter, and flutter

the chemical pours through the muscles and the butterfly
blooms, takes wing at hill-start, straight to heart
physical
spiritual
infinitely wonderful
for him, for her, for them, and for forever

Years later
Bathsheba's psychiatrist
Was analysing the tryst
Between King David
And her.


It was no tryst
Said she.
What a slur.
He was a ******
And an opportunist.


An amoeba would concur
Said the psychiatrist
That a shower screen
And being more demure
Would have been
Quite spiritually enterprising.


You cannot expect
Kind David to desist
From objectifying your femurs
And a cracking pair of amethysts.


Don't treat me
Like some calculating
Hormone Exchange Unit
You sexist misogynist.


You are not fit
To analyse me.


You say your name's Freud
But you're wholly devoid
Of any insight
Of what is amiss
Or my troubles might be.


Not one piece of grit
Have you put in my oyster.
You obsequious churl
I'm a girl you don't mess with.


I could have you hung.


But instead she dismissed him
and booked an appointment
With a certain professor
Who went by the name of
Carl Gustav Jung.

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
With Bill And Ted
To buy two bottles
Of mineral water.


Jack and Jill
Came tumbling down
Fatally cracking their heads open
And the local council was done
For corporate manslaughter.


But Bill and Ted
Came down on their mountain bikes
With the mineral water
towed on a skateboard.


And having buried Jack and Jill
At an environmentally friendly funeral
They headed for the Amazon
On solar powered surfboards.


Thus they concurred
This was yet again
As vinegar
Bed and
Brown paper-free
As there ever could be
Excellent Adventure.