A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy's letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.

The sun is shining and
moonbeams glisten through the air.
Moon, not sun.
While the sun shone
and incinerated the sloshing intestines of
vengeful beasts;
the gentle and forgiving moon
projected from their eyes and
caught the ****** maw of a starving deer.
Suitcases of leather stacked behind us
filled with spruce, pine, elm, oak, cherry.
Ready for induction t
o our paperless society
which consumes the forests of
Hippolyta and Antiope mercilessly.
Burning every leaf
then forgetting to feel
because nothing mattered.
Everything never mattered.
Facts are lie, opinion is truth.
“No one is nothing”
they shriek to the heavens
striving to be limitless
and scorning morality. Embrace death
and all its glory.
Life, while full of happiness
and gorgeous splendor,
refuses to acknowledge the
magnitude of the word. The thing.
Falling and reading and lines
and circles and explosions
and whimpers and screams. Agony suffered
silently, alone; never understood
because how could it?
What could totally encompass
the raging fire that devours the veins
and burns from the inside out
kept in place by the impenetrable
flesh that glints in the forgiving moonlight.
A hostile exterior that
smiles, waves, laughs on cue to
disguise the raging storm
fighting its way through from inside.
The shell which shrinks from the moonbeam
and into the harsh sunlight
that filters beneath the floating clouds.

Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply.  It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous.  Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.

I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt.  Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out.  Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away.

this is an endless hellscape
housed by demons mocking my torture
blood rains from my fingertips
clotting in the gaping mouths
of the spectators' bellow
my bones snap and mend at crooked angles
set by my captor
injecting formaldehyde to freeze my body
poisoned by exposure

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Because we might get unbound
Of something that's stalling us both
And taste and see new shores
(you need it more tHan I do)
Because Amy might not be the soundtrack
And my good fortune's still there, untouched

I love you, but things they change
Let's not file a list of complaints
and keep going, going
Because oh baby I loved you so...
but my wings were getting weak and stunted
And I cannot take it.