"Tell me I am beautiful;
I feel the weight of every line,
crease, and wrinkle, just now.

Laying here in your arms
I could believe anything!"

She said.  Silence . . .her heart broke.
Suddenly a soft purring, snoring rose!
She snuggled and they both slept.

Almost out of body
Almost mad from the
Pressure of it-
Great leviathan
Crouching on my rib cage
My heart strains to grow wings,
To take flight when I glimpse
The poisonous rubies of its eyes
And when its fanged mouth opens to
Set me aflame
I wonder if
I’ll ever stop burning

It’s a vital red
A scorpion’s sting
A piercing and
Unending scream
It ripped apart the
Heart of me
And still it
Goes on running

Trust the sun (she says)
her first rays when creation was young
and God's window opened outward
as a place of worship
born to be breathtaken
daylight imploring for companionship
and bleeding into itself
as it bleeds into the worshipper.

She notices that her own taste
in repeating patterns doesn’t mesh
with the apparently similar
patterns in Drakensberg
they obey a different logic, and the friction
between them generates
a fascinatingly ambiguous color.

Tinctured cathedral of time passing
on its first layer of stairs...

a desire to erase,
to stay away forever.

an opportunity to transfigure,
to sit on the floor and wait for storms.

a line to cross, a lion at dusk,
a catastrophist.

a pen filled with acid,
a book of theories full of holes.

once this begins, there are only endings.

what vibes with me
cancels you out