Free will
Comes with a heavy price.
Spend it wisely.

This brilliant morning
anything is possible

we are limited only
by rigid minds
whose fragile confines

can be vaporized
by choice alone.

you touched your wrists
to mine
and a rash blossomed
across my skin
red and dry
ran across  
indigo hills
fields of turned-over soil
in the night-time
to cool my
strangled sweat
to find a sink
a light in the kitchen.

im sorry, i promise
i'll buy a slice
i just need to use your sink, please.

fluorescent-white
heat
i put the water on the hottest setting
and i scrub and
scrub, and scrub
fast, and hard
i rinse the raw
i leave.

when I wake up
for all my scrubbing
the rippling rash, the buds
are still there
under my skin.
a lone fungal stalk
of crimson
a fruiting body
rises from my wrist.

this does not belong
here
like a broken bone
bending in the wrong direction
under the skin
like the voice on
the other end of the line
this is not real

black ties
don't absorb sunlight
like their counterparts.
There are
instead
bullet holes.
and a man that can't breathe.

But this isn't simply
business casual.
It's a boost in morale
for hollow hearts
and the whipped counterparts.

My hands are free, my hands are free
Keep open eyes and remember me
And rage against this machine
that makes me seem
like I'm everything
they want me to be.

He gave me a choice, you know.
Have a will of my own, or follow Him into battle.
One bite. One bite to free us all.
Did I dare?
No.
Yes.
No.
Yes!
I dared to be intoxicated, be blamed for it all.
Bite, chew, swallow.
He gave me a choice.
And I dared to take the wrong path.

I chose ice-cream
Over yogurt;
Strawberry, vanilla or chocolate.
Each equally without prejudice
Attracted.
The fifteen year old server
Was kinda short;
The vanilla tub had about three scoops
Remaining,
Stacked hidden like frozen snow-*****
As in war games.
His task would have been daunting
And embarassing,
And I, a humanitarian
From higher education,
An altruist from St. Joseph's,
Could not allow it.

The chocolate tub
Was yet covered,
And the sobbing child's cries
Were hardening in my ears
As Dad tried to allay
His chocolate tears,
Applying the five second rule.
I am an empath
By nature and poetry,
So, turning from chocolate,
Left me strawberrry.
Triple scoop too.
I believe
You thought through
Your choices
Like flavors of ice-cream.
Being imaginative,
I do.

Leave us in a bedroom
a locked room
both bound by a fleeting veneration
but no tangible definition
and windows will fog up
with excess anxious laughter
and phlegmmed throats
til the glass transforms
transparent to translucent
so the outside world becomes
an informed guess about
which coloured shape is going
                   where.
The door handle will twist into the room’s
home grown central nervous system
backed by rising voices
rising pulses
assuring ourselves it is
everybody outside
who is trapped and not us
because ‘cosy’ has scribbled over
‘cramped’ between the sheets of peeling
wallpaper and bodies upon bodies upon
bodies only excites.
We will stay in bed
cocooned around this single duvet
and distracted into its folds because this
is how we choose to spend
free will. Don't
murmur about the locked door
and even when it opens for
lack of air or food
so we tentatively tread through into the
open, or perhaps closed,
I beg you to
grab my wrist and pull me back and whisper
tear yourself up
decrease with me
because this will always be the one place we’ll happily suffocate.