Ornaments of olive eyes
Wading sleepy through starry skies
A silver window of heavens light
Sing me to sleep this winter night
Azalea, lay your flowers in the snow
As I lay, the wind shivers aching bones
Waiting calm for lower tides
I etched a poem in the stone
Rusty sheets, broken boards
Broken folds we call our homes
Azalea, the prettiest face
As I wait, for the dead to come back home

You pressed your lips on to his like it was nothing.
Then cried into his shoulder like it meant everything.
Now my car is full of ash and smoke
because no one bothered to open a window.

It still smells of mud and dew from the grass
that was above the stone that I made a promise to.
It felt like a ghost followed us home
but only because he was curious about what everything had become.
I helped her up the stairs easy enough
and I was even able to carry you to bed.

I learned so much that windy, rainy night
and just like that ghost I am bound to silence.

My shadow is caste out far.
It does not see my stars.
I wish it could say how I feel,
That would make one of us feel real.
Although I remind my self of my existence,
Through the pain, and the staring glance
Of passers by who should mind their business
My heart feels hollow like a grave in the process
Of being dug out,
And death lies all around and all about.

Inside the sun
while afraid of serrated edges;
he shouts at his gun,
and he speaks of wedges
to **** the kicking-bird.
Yet the sound was unheard,
Therefore ineffective was a discouraging word.

Nearby three lovers undead
for them three tears left unshed,
as the misery of apathy is laughing in bed.
The flowers must push up themselves
his time round,
but if you would dare to compare,
Ye might sleep in a flower-bed underground.
Still these crippled are crumpled
and the crackle of wheat
is a sound oft untested
beneath peasant feet.

So Apollo’s beginning has met the Apollo’s end.
And while science sends defiance
it has found us a friend,
who eats not the lilly-flower
when blood is in flight,
nor covers you sun-beings
when the time is not night.
For in each egg there is a dream that is dying,
and in all minds a clear-seeing
first birthed by the light.
So caress the face of that faceless that's crying,
so it will hold you
while being held fast
in the night.

The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.

The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.

Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.

The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.

O lay me dOwn
By Grandfather's side
Where the last Ones sang their sOng
Tell me hOw tO end my life
Please -
O you've never yet been wrOng

We are all going to die.
We are all going to be forgotten.
It doesn't matter if your grave is six feet deep and three feet wide,
Or if your body was slung over the side,
of a boat in motion
from hands devoid of emotion
We all end up just the same.
Decayed and rotten.
Forgotten.
If that isn't Equality,
I don't know what is.