even as your heart drags you through the circles of hell
and your knees buckle under the weight of life,
a soft, confident voice rouses the parts of your soul
that nudge your spirit back into its natural rhythm.
you slowly rise, feeling the ashes under your feet.

Is death an ancient ache
Like this one
The dull rattle in the murderous cavern
Lined with resin and dust and tar and pure guts
A reminder of the last cigar
Of our bruised and battered makeup

Is death the embrace of silence
This stillness that permeates
My rotten cavities
That trickles through arteries
Bleeds
And leaves behind internal wreckage
The likes of which you’ve never seen

Or is it sweet
Like the moan your lips release
When you take my body
And shake and make me scream
My legs weep
That cry of peace

Is it that big white hand
That envelops me
Somewhere to finally get good sleep

It might be so
It lives in me
It sees
Far beyond my periphery
Far out of reach

Death was not made for me alone
I don’t claim to know death
But I know

Death begins on a gray day
When the blue eye glazes over
Blazes into a crack in the concrete
Where a million dead filaments
Form static
A haze
That is when it is time to escape

When tenderness becomes the great facade
And one fails to recognize their own face
Death and the Fates
Assume their human form
And you put on your own black robe
In pure day, in a field of golden hay

Death and dullness
Expose your cowardice
Until decay reigns.

Funny hell, under the spotlights explained,
Painfully cruel, well built,
exposing the gravity of your wrong doing.
When time comes, please, tell me,
do show me how proud you are of yourself!
Hell, funny as it should be for the devil.
She once spoke of the devil being a god,
Doesn’t god mean everything?
Inspiration, sweetest love on earth and beyond,
Isn’t everyone the same here? Lovely
You fight for a right, yours.
Claimed! Right now and forever, claimed
My right to fight and stronger, reach happiness.

i’m in the same place where i wrote a poem about yew
where eye compared the dawning sky
to your aura of light
but i forgot yew can fall just as much
for potential instead of for who
yew are.
eye saw what i wanted to see.
yew bristles around me
sap drizzling thru my wounds
words of red berry yew dripped
onto me like a cloying poison.
i choked sweet in Faerie
hungering for more which i cannot
taste. hollow bark hollow branches
reaching for my spirit(s) as eye
cross onto another plane of existence
where yew cannot follow.
eye am hardly free in this place
childhood memories under the
yew tree making virulent memories
laurels & wreaths wrap around me
eye am guided? eye am saved?
by yew? following yew across
Hell’s rivers. the Styx looked back at me
in the eyes of myself. Acheron stung
like the needle of yew thistles.
The Lethe offered me cleanliness
but as eye cannot forgive
i do not deserve to forget.
Phlegethon scorned me like yew jealousy,
the Cocytus bade me deafness
thru my own wails & eye ran
these yew trial me, seeing if eye
cling like a cicada to your bark
screaming and shedding skin in graphic
rebirth of the self against yew.
eye run from the truth but i have yew
to thank. guide me threw
steer my path correction course.

the axe finally lands. yew fall.
eye use yew bark to burn away
what remains of you
&
eye.