You can busy yourself about the day
Keep the wretched words away
Write, so they are not so strong
Read, so you do nothing wrong.

They will catch up on you, however
With you and your heart forever,
These tiny little gnawing thoughts
With their presence you are lost.

Among the headaches and the pain
In this place nothing to gain

Shut your eyelids tight
When the stars are high
And the moon is bright

But try and wish what you may
You cannot keep the thoughts away
On your little devoured soul
You wish, you wish you could be whole.

If she gathers enough sticks,
she'll be able to get the fire going real nice;
enough to see her hand
in front of her face for a change.

She's been scratching around in the dark,
wide-eyed and ravenous,
feeling the ground for wood
for what seems like hours.

Her fingers start to blister and sting
from the friction and the grinding
of her begging and pleading
for just one measly spark.

It's been like this since that day
when everything was still pretty nice
in her podunk town where she
was known as the black sheep.

That day, that day, in late April,
when she raised her hand up
stuck out her thumb and
blotted out the sun.

She woke up with dirt under her nails
and pulled a lock of hair out
that was starting to mat.
She went to sleep with dirt under her nails.

She went to sleep hungry
and now she chews on anything that moves
in the umbra that couldn't be too far
from where she used to live.

Dead leaf blankets-
"Are the trees still alive?
What did the forest smell like,
sound like, at high noon?"

"What were colors?
Light-lovers and their shrieking tears
filled with nostalgic longing for
magical, pretty un-black; privileges".

Sanctum in the murk.
She walks tonight, but not far.
"I am the mother of the moth,
and the sudden ritenuto".


) o ( ●

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

They say to have a writer
Fall in love with you
So you will never die.
But I say
Seize the love of a musician.
Someone to write you
Into colors in the air
And star-****** behind the eyelids
Of any who will listen
To the tale of you that they wrote.

Musicians, like writers,
Bring light through a fog
With their love-speak and poems.
But music-makers
Can create flowers in winter
And warmth without fire.
Their melodies dance
Over the swish of grass blades
And between the tooth-gaps of children
Whose fingers are sticky
With sweet popsicle juice
While an oil-painted scene
Is painted in your mind.

So be cherished my a musician
And hear yourself forever;
Be sung by a hundred different voices,
Danced by fairies and pretty young girls,
Costumed in dissonance,
Etched into souls.
For you can never really die
When you echo forever in the cavern
Of a good song.