A beach is roughest in winter
As snow and sand run through my hand
I lie in the dunes
Awaiting Doom and Death
My brethren in fighting life’s last joys
We delight in lighting the ocean aflame.
Lions are tamed in their cages, when
The strings of a harp tighten around their throats.
Analyzing the ragged fabric of my fantasies;
How can they be so dark, when they’re mine?
I’d like nothing more
Than to envision my paradise:
Drinking milk from the ****
Spitting cherry pits out, with
Gregory’s soft voice filling my head. But
The visions and sounds are murky,
It’s always lurking nearby- muddying up the water.
My fantasies instead, are of the beach.

The fire is spreading now
The flames are tinged blue
Doom and Death are collecting my dues
Their fingers leave bruises.
The fire is hungry
And milk will no longer put it out.
Human sacrifice was fine for ancients
Barbaric now, feed to it the sacred cow.

Birds with clipped wings outline her eyes
Her eye shadow is her divine disguise,
That hides the tears that overflow
They pitter-patter on her chest, as her heartbeat slows
Into silence; the violence of her red wine dress
A good merlot, alcohol makes her depressed.

To see her blurred mind in its state of undress
Is to watch genius itself infinitely regress
To the point of pictures that adorn cave walls.
She sees the light flicker in the hall
As synapses lapse and lost are the words
They’ve all gone rotten, solidified into curds.
Exhaustion provides a high in her mind
Though most of her thoughts are quite unkind.

She knows the danger of the man who enchants
Her, and makes her body obediently dance
To a greater demon, with his demonic hymn
He weakens her conscience, makes her integrity dim.

She pursues dusk at a New Orleans café
Surviving on French roast, and warm beignets
A stranger sweeps through the foggy air
Running his fingers through her brittle hair,
Devilishly trying to steal her resolve
Till her past is lost and her future’s dissolved
Like salt into a saturated ocean
Where despair is defined by a lack of motion.
Her notion of life is just the beauty of its rhythm
Its color diffracted by poetry’s prism;
Her head is filled with her loves and lusts
That killed her heart with a thousand cuts
To end the war before it could start
Her captain sailed her home with his outdated charts.

Cigarette butts are put out on her tongue
The smoke and ash remind her of when she was young,
How tobacco evaporates as cigarettes burn
And how pain is love’s method for making us learn,
The lesson of despair contained in every regret,
Best learned when she lets her feet get wet.
Her epiphanies’ are dormant in her single-minded brain
Footsteps catching echoes of the departed train
Leaving the station for some stable place
The mountains and sun conjoined at her face,
A pas de deux she devised at Swan Lake
A heavenly intervention done for God’s sake.

Her mind is warped and can’t recognize
That the warm promise contains the largest of lies.

Fluorescent lights destroyed her poet’s vision,
She recovered her strength at the holy mission
Only to give in and be hypnotized,
By the greatness that the priests prophesized.

The words seem clumsy in the day’s rough light
Their power comes from the isolation of her nights
To go under and not once come up for air
If she dies she’ll realize she has no heir
To look after her fortune of memories and tissues
When her heart shuts down from years of disuse
Because she put up bricks to keep heartbreak at bay
But it ended up keeping those she cares about away.

She’s losing the invincibility that comes with her age
Sacrificing her thoughts for what gets on the page;
But is it worth it in the end? She really hopes so
Otherwise her disguise will fly off when the wind blows
Too hard and fast for her suffering mind
She feels her body getting closer to death all the time.

She prays for a friend, so not to spend her nights alone crying
Indulging in self-loathing and truly despising
Herself. Her tears fall and splatter
Meanwhile her heart’s aching; it’s in tatters,
She puts on a smile to show nothing’s the matter
And hopes that next time it’ll be her heartache that’s shattered.

Her crayons are sprawled out
Across the steakhouse’s table,
Drawing the star they want her
To be. The mood lighting casts shadows;
Their wrinkled, withered faces dampen her eyes.
“Can I show mommy my drawing?”
“…”
“Do you guys like it?”
“…”
She stops trying, they munch on flesh
A cash cow is more tender than most.
She’s hungry, and gets nothing,
Told to smell the sweetness of an apple
And spend the rest of her life chasing its taste;
Never achieved, they empty her of her dreams
Replaced by frauds.
Then the check finally comes, but at what cost?

The sled is overfilled with gifts
Given by friends to friends,
Lovers’ quarrels have begun to shift
They dance in the streets again.

It’s a light fog, not smoke, that romances the air
We don’t have to weep for our sins.
There’s atonement to be found at the local fair
Where today is the day that forgives.

There’s hope in hearts and laughter in lungs
No beasts around to rob them
No longer trying to descend the rungs
To solve a short term problem.

I woke up on my final day
With a cut on my finger;
It’s not enough to be invisibly damaged.

I felt the heat before the light
Out of sight, it oppresses me,
She depresses me, in the distance.

Count down the time till we dine,
The paper cups rattle as the
Manic guy babbles against the **** and Nazis.
A funny mind is rotting, as I begin my departure.

Picked up by parents, carry my things, say goodbye
To the light-hearted detoxers, ending their sleepless night;
They put me in a mood worth having.

Step out into the summer morning air
My hair tossed in the breeze, pale pink and light lilac coat the horizon.
Today, my smile rises with the sun.

It’s faded, my future is jaded and
Is paraded through my line of sight like
A mangled, malnourished show pony that looks
Older than it is;
Old beyond its years, in terms of exhaustion.
It’ll be a work animal soon enough, a day laborer
With nights spent with the moon around it
And days with remembering the sun, imagining Her
Finding some other demented soul willing
To drive himself insane over Her.

Take each step one at a time, and only once,
The detoxers know this well.
Cling to the hope of getting better
And becoming whole again.
It seems so unlikely, I know,
But hope, no matter how slim the edge of it is,
Is worth grasping with every ounce of strength.
Then you can pull yourself up,
Drink from the cup,
And see the sun
Shining Her warmth with a smile.

Love or lust is
The semantics of romantics.
There’s love in my heart and veins
For the two-braided blonde, with the off-color tooth
And the smile that somehow both
Gives me chills and soothes me.
I am the earth, my thoughts- the moon, and She is the sun:
The constant by which my time is measured.
In day I think of her, at night I dream of her.
I cordon off my thoughts of her
They lead to a loss of sanity.
The right dose, however, keeps the motor running,
The eye on the prize,
Puts me to sleep where the thoughts are good
And innocent, instead of the thoughts
Where I’m lying awake
In the dead of night
Thinking of the other options she must have;
Why she’d waste time on a **** up like me,
Who’s confined to this space and can’t escape,
Forced only to think, i.e.,
What got me here in the first place.
I want to leave
I need to get out
To tell her the feeling that courses through
Every inch of me- now, while the fear has abated,
Before cowardice comes back, and I think she has hated me
All along, and the smile was forced,
The laughter, pained
The sarcasm, disguising disgust instead of playfulness.
My body burns
With the desperation of a young man’s desire.
I have to get back to her
To put out the fire from the sun
Or at least tame it;
For she can keep me going
While I’m kept here, tucked away,
Or she could destroy me with
The thought of her each day.