black
nightmare
the voices
inside my head
disturb sanity
preventing morning light
from coming through the darkness
everything in my head stops dead
the voices say i must try get out
the only one that can stop them is death

the pills go down and darkness comes again
the voices start getting quiet
slowly morning starts coming through
all the pain begins to fade
and thoughts become clearer
the urge to live dims
death welcomes me
and deep down
my heart
beams

Most words get casually tossed into the air,
gently carried away by their impermanence,
lack of true depth or meaning.
This is the majority of conversation.

Some words stumble out unwillingly,
forced out over tongue and through teeth.
These words are harder to coerce into being,
yet too heavy to be kept inside.  

And then there are words flung out innocently,
born of a benevolent background
or intending no substantial meaning at all.
But the implied connotation is hurtful nonetheless.

Or the words haphazardly spit out
in a weakened moment of anger,
and the regret runs deeper than the thought
put behind the decision to hurl them around

These are the words that settle into minds,
the ones that flop out and lie there,
panting from the exertion of the pain caused,  
intentional or not.

Be wary of the words you bring into existence.

Scorched pavement would hold on to day
light. The concrete,
still warm, would kiss my barefoot feet.

Until dark I
would roam on summer nights, tasting
freedom in my

midnight curfew. When autumn came,
dancing in like
blown leaves skinned off weary trees, the

sumac flushed red
as cardinals wings blanketing
the landscape and

reminding me that winter comes
with a heavy
hand. Bitter green apples fall from

the backyard tree,
does and fawns passing through to eat
the fallen fruit

are startled by me and dart back
to the swamp where
the fog rises up every night.

Poplar trees stood tall while their leaves
made the final
kamikaze plunging fall. New

Converse shoes made
their debut on the way to school,
briefly, happy.

Winter brought isolation and
dreams of still warm
city streets under wandering

feet. Holding out
through cold purple glow, I wait for
spring’s warmer air.

You. You were
never better than when
you
wore that cologne
that smelled like Havana nights and
fresh cinnamon spice.
Your
scent keeps haunting me through
days and nights.

What is it
about sensory types
of
memories? I
can't shake you from my five senses
no matter how
hard
I've tried. Will you forget
about mine?

(For Martin Emmett)

I write your name
on window panes

I clap out its five syllables
for the five fingers of my hand

and the five senses
lost and abandoned

I see deep white snow
and signposts buried in the drifts

I hear the jet black engine
running under my sternum

I touch the mirrored stillness
You still, me still here

I smell the red raw emptiness
bloodied, ***** and free

I taste the green of bitterness
acid etching ulcers in a stomach wall

I trace the ink of your signature
follow each loop and dot of the ‘i’

that ‘i’ Martin
that has been erased forever.

Not against the peaks of protest, these aurulent banners and jasperated jaspe so so jargoon! It's like I was suddenly alive, beat-stretched out of winter neige and into the pancosmic blisses of bright and ebullient spring, plugged with an agromania to abide this new formidable friend in the aeviternal beauty of she and I togetherness. Never to spill a morsel of a minute away from us again, upon the newly conjured spirits unto us both. To be amidst a cynosure of such affiation, to be in the temperate or tropical gardens whispering about our mutual love for flowers nad lists. This that precedes us, bright colliding auras in this newfound numinous kindling of us two. Watching it, making it happen- it unfolding before me made me naseaus with excitement, dithering what our next move out to be. I just wanted to kiss her face, her cheeks, put our hands together so quickly, just to let our amorous fug fill the room with silver albuminious smoke from our breaths. Miles below this, round the Earth to other places, there are the fixtures of bright and corybantic life commoved by other nations and other poised people of the light, that I should not be idle in my desires to usher myself into this grand and briguing introduction. So she said, we will play the question game, the inquiry game, we will state the mark, draw upon deep and fantastical recall, bring from our minds the most immense truths and share them, no matter now feral, or caustic, or melancholy- they will be shared until we explode with each other, our intrigues wrapped in our perfervid and amatory excitedness for one another. Too vast with wonder to be afraid of- am I such a fiend for such resplendence. That we could be vitrified in eternity in a veil of fulgurite. So at this nightfall, this acronychal of bloviating bliss, to write and wonder, incessantly in the finest of provincial matters to settle this garden where Thetis lives to be of her, two philocalists in verdant pasture, heaped with matters of the pen and the palm, in the droves of this beautiful advesperating eve- where first I wrote to you, and then I wrote you back.

Da dana da da dana da,
Da dana da da da;
Dana da ddana da,
Da dana da dada.

You, Sir, are clarity.
Yet your mind wanders aloof;
Sun, clear opacity