Loneliness is a sketchwork of pen and ink of iron gall,
Brushed over in brown wash of wood soot from oak,
Disguised then under tempera of golden-ratio of yolk,
Flared over with fiery oils to the smoke-blurred brink, sfumato,
Or pigment of the fresco, a shade of off-life, languid as watercolor,
Or from the too-fondly-felt impasto knife.

But bares its bones in the light-dark cleft of Caravaggio,
With diminutions of death and the storm’s dark imbroglio,
And sunlight as flesh made into soul,
The skin stretched whole around the world.

Each sky is just a sketch
Of loneliness, left unsigned,
By every hand.

I probably love the truth
And the Truth is poetic
I propose that poetic lines be banned
Does that sound poetic

Venezia, its musical key of brick and shade
And the canals in rejoining polyphony
Sweeten the dour Church-ear.  
From the impasto knife and loose brushwork,
A thumb-smear of waves and gently-bristled strife
Rise to assumption of the cloud-submerged bay,
Mural of cristallo, only-light without landscape,
Made too from the winds of Murano,
Its clayed blowpipe of waterways molding
The lagoon of blown glass and bouquet of colored sea-shadows.

The Tiber lies on its side, like the lion and fox,
Licking its paws at empire’s dust,
A drifting gaze of water that already foresees
The swift-run northward to Romagna,
Where the veined fur of the roe will succumb…
A ripple twitches like one dark claw of the Borgia…

The watercolors of the Arno are a fresco
On the wet plaster of the lips of Firenze, Tuscan fire-dream.
Or like the warring leg in curve of counterpoise,
Sprung foot-forward to the daring world
And arm slung down in stone-victory
From this valley, too much like Elah,
With taunting eyes turned from the Medici toward Rome.

she was obsessed with this idea of rebirth because she messed up too many times; she believed everyone deserved a Rennaisance, and it was her vision of the circle yeats drew,

and it was for dreamers who squatted in gutters along alleyways hoping to find a muse fallen and buried in the filth;

and it was for realists who really had fallen and buried themselves in filth because their homes were lower than that;

and it was for addicts, who believed they had really been to the moon and conspired against naysayers;

and it was for conspiracists who knew all along the moon simply didn't exist because they had it manufactured in their kitchen;

and it was for sleeping girls with trembling hands who sought out this kitchen in the night whilst everyone merrily slept;

and it was for the sleeping boy who really wasn't asleep but lying naked under sheets and limbs;

and it was for the tangled limbs that still quivered next to him from a dissolved ecstasy, boyish and sad and hungry;

and it was for that hidden starving hunger that still plagued the neighborhood's homes and lingered on doorsteps, begging;

and it was for begging peals of laughter that his mother sent up from the rooftop when the sky went dark and only her kin across town, reeling, beastly, gorgeous, could ever reply;

and it was for unsent replies, for conscripted soldiers, for wars fought by better men and surveyed by lesser;

and it was for less-than-scrupulous masters who hid under their solemn cathedral art that spoke higher than god himself;

and it was for god who left the world to fend under his illusory cloak of stars, so dim it only mocked his fiery wrath beneath;

and it was for that fiery wrath, the kind that incited and ravaged and devastated, merciless with abandon for all of mankind's own misgivings;

and it was those misgivings that had started her renaissance, her quest for glory cores and sovereign minds, for signs and streets and women and colors and light and the end of all suffering;

it was for restart (like a death, but shorter), somewhere between termination and a genesis in vitro (the liminal space found within and without); for her alone, solitary line cleaving the shadowy folds of time, defiant, windswept, miraculous, insignificant glitch through the eternal night; for her, until she commanded time to stop; for her, hungry; for her, powerful; for her, terrified; for her for her and only ever her: the regifted universe.

nobody knew how much she’d broken her own heart.
it was cracked to *******
and so much pain she couldn’t bear
her smooth skin painted in tears
salty like the sea
and cold, and unforgiving like dismal melancholia
she walks across the room
tiptoeing like she’s treading on new snow
amanda reaches for the bottle
and drowns in
a saintship made of modern renaissance