I wake as your  friend                                     You wake as my lover
I speak as your lover                                       You speak as my friend
I act as your possession                                   You are my possesion
I rebel as your cover                                        A means to an end
I hurt for your compassion                             You live for my acceptance
I injure for your respect                                  Though it's never been withheld
I confide for your emotion                              You crave my direction
I give and you collect                                      Never will you rebel

This is madness                                               This is Sparta
This is insanity                                                This is the price of exellence
I can't be everything for you                          I am your everything
You can't be everything for me                     I am magnificence
You treat everyone the same                         I am fair and righteous
As a friend, yet as a lover                              And yet you seek more
And it's a cruel, cruel game                          Dare you grow capricious
From your twisted love, no one recovers     You'll become one I abhor

I am done                                                       You are confused
(I am never done)                                          And I will not calm you
I am sick                                                        As I am amused
(But I'm not tired)                                         As I drop little clues  
I will run                                                        You'l­l never leave me
(I won't run)                                                  But I'll abandon you
Because I love you                                        You'll always need me
(A better word is 'desire')                             And I'll never need you

Let me go!                                                    My grip is vice-like
(But you're not holding me)                       I'm not ready to let you go
Bring me back!                                            If I lose you, 'my dear'
(But I never left)                                          I must find yet another 'beau'
Love me only!                                             And I've not the time to put effort
(But you love equally)                               In little minions like you
Push me away!                                          I've not a care to give for
(Or bridge this rift)                                    You insects I never knew

Please, disappear                                       I am your torture
One day you'll understand                      But I am your salvation
That the twisted way you love                 I am your executioner
Could coax death from any human        And I am your redemption
Please, disappear!                                     You'll wish me dead forever
Though I'll weep when you're gone        You'll wish me dead I know
I know sanity will return                          And you'll wish yourself deader
And I'll eventually move on.                    *When away I finally go.

it should be noted that girls don't always come from venus, that some boys might be a little deader than they were before they claimed you took their breath away.
some girls have barbed wire around their hearts, and others have white flags. some boys have touched more cigarettes than thighs, more blades in the bathroom sink than the ones in her shoulders. the city might whisper the name of one boy and tremble at the thought of another; a girl might  have a hit list with only one name on it — her own. some boys will **** just to say they lost their virginity and some boys will spend the rest of their lives making love as though they could gain it back; some girls have lost their tears and sweat in the upholstery of the same car that might belong to one of these boys — and some of those same boys are sweaty handprints on the backseat windows while others are fingerprints on your throat, but no matter how you look at it, he will always leave his mark, won't he?
it should be noted that some girls will miss you like hiroshima playgrounds miss the laughter of young children, but others will miss you like an 11:30 flight at 11:31, and i bet you never knew that some boys will never tell you that they miss their father just as much as some girls calling everyone else 'daddy' except for the one they truly need; you'd never believe me if i said that some girls look at the night sky where they used to see their reelection in the stars, but now only see another broken mirror.
it should be noted, that not all boys are from mars.

I'm constantly checking Snapchat and Instagram, and instantly decoding your posts like a cryptogram. In a millisecond my brain goes from using a gig of ram, to oozing out ten petabytes, like *******.
It won't slow down and I'm trying to stay chill, so I gotta down another bottle of pills. This also helps with the hunger that I'm trying to fill, going from starved, to full, to just feeling ill.
Nauseating dizzying feeling and I'm flustered, populating my stomach with crackers dipped in mustard, I don't like food, but I've started to wonder why my ribs hurt, might be the undying hunger.
I can't pull my eyes away from it as I slit upon my thighs and think of a beautiful ***** I'll never get, so I get lost in distractions to forget her. I've come to accept that this is the truth as I accept the cold and give her my sweater. Attempted controlled suicide at a park plus the letter. If she goes in for anything then I guess I will let her. But every time she touches me it lights a fuse that only activates when she's not around, only clutches me closely when there's nobody else in the vicinity inbound making me feel deader.

It should be noted that girls don't always come from Venus, that some boys might be a little deader than they were before they claimed you took their breath away. Some girls have barbed wire around their hearts, and others have white flags. Some boys have touched more cigarettes than thighs, more blades in the bathroom sink than the ones in her shoulders. The city might whisper the name of one boy and tremble at the thought of another; a girl have a hit list with only one name on it — her own. Some boys will **** just to say they lost their virginity and some boys will spend the rest of their lives making love as though they could gain it back; some girls have lost their tears and sweat in the upholstery of the same car that might belong to one of these boys — and some of those same boys are sweaty handprints on the backseat windows while others are fingerprints on your throat (no matter how you look at it, he will always leave his mark, won't he?)
  It should be noted that some girls will miss you like Hiroshima playgrounds miss the laughter of young children, but others will miss you like an 11:30 flight at 11:31, and I bet you never knew that some boys will never tell you that they miss their father just as much as some girls calling everyone else Daddy except for the one they truly need; you'd never believe me if I said that some girls look at the night sky where they used to see their reelection in the stars, but now only see another broken mirror.
  It should be noted, that not all boys are from Mars.

I seem to be getting older
Every ******* day I am alive.
My mind and body growing,
But with that something dies.

There used to be a demon,
Who slept beneath my bed.
I haven't heard him howl in years.
I know that ******'s dead.

I considered myself and artist.
But now I see the flaws.
I had a pink plastic cell phone,
But now it won't make calls.

The world I lived in,
Was mainly gold and white
But my mind won't stop expanding
Now there's no room for light.

And even as I sit here
writing these ******* rhymes.
I feel childish and ignorant,
Now there another piece has died.

whatever.  i'm so clever.  yeah.  whatever.  i can break the lame guys in when they give last rites. the deader the better the girls sigh.  open up to new norms.  electric rules the old worms.  fortune anorexic wonder. blonder, longer, simpler, subtler.  partial to the flower you think and forever after ....

Stack the bodies higher
Stack them for the empire
People want more cash
So they sell harmful weapons
They don't mind the ash
Made of victims of aggression
Like collateral children in Yemen
Who are needlessly sent to heaven
Or the schoolchildren in Florida
Who had to go face the coroner
These children only know what we teach them
So how come the only things that can reach them
Are our weapons
And deadly directions?
Because of lobbyists like the NRA
Using logic from the seventh grade
To create a coalition of those who believe what they're told
And those unwilling to change because they're too old
And adults who desperately want their toys
Even if it means the death of little boys
So the bodies continue to stack to the sky
For people who dream of killing black guys
Black in the sense that they don't know who they are
They just want to feel hard
Stuck in a childish fantasy of protecting their home
Or a petulant fear of the unknown

Their economic gain
Causes ballistic pain
Inside their bullet rain
Innocence circles the drain
But we must make decisions together
Even with the emotionally severed
In order to make our society better
Until then our children get deader

They use uncertainty to buy time
And convince the masses
That the real problem is crime
To create rhetoric molasses
Because they make a living
From us dying
They don't mind bullet giving
Until we're lying
Six feet under
The guns sound like thunder
Warning of an approaching lightning storm
Where the rain drops stab us to our core
Then mix with the blood on the floor
Until civilization is no more

I hear loud guns
Then I hear church bells
I walk in the sun
But the foul dirt smells
Of the corpses of countless kids
Representing high contract bids
And the tears of their mothers
That are swept under the covers
By those with no empathy
That cause only entropy
Then they expect to live near us
A gun will make them hear us

there's a color in my heart that cannot be created
using pastels or pencils
it could never be painted
darker than black
more angry than red
much brighter than white could aspire to have been
more alive than green
but deader than grey
like purple but harder to wash it away
blue with more hurting
brown but more *****
orange with much stronger emotions there burning

There is no more straddling state lines for you.  

You are no longer teetering on the edge of
               life          and           death
because you are now deader than my father’s
dead bell heart.  You are laying in a morgue and
I am sitting on a train, miles and miles from you.  An
early bloomer, a preemie baby boy, you are
                                                                ­              one day too soon.  

I am watching the trees of Arkansas of Missouri of Illinois
pass me by, but you are being
                                                      whisked
                                                                ­      and
                                                                ­               twirled
                                                                ­      and
                                                      whirled
                    through the stars.
(I am trying to imagine what it must feel like to
explode into a supernova, to
implode into a constellation.
I am trying to contemplate what it means to
reach                    
                            i n f i n i t y        
                                  and
                 ­           n i h i l i t y
                                                             at the same time.)

Careening headfirst towards the midwest, I
am heading towards a home I no longer wish to go.  I have
spent my night in a daze between
                                                              asleep        and        awake,
listening to a man snore and a baby cry, and nothing is stopping
me from thinking about the steps in post-mortem care.  I have
seen dead bodies before.  I have touched dead bodies before.  
I do not want to come in contact with yours.  

My problem is not that you finally finished your
transition from                  boy        to        skeleton,
my problem is that you did so without
asking your mother’s permission.  I read the
Book of James the night before your surgery two years ago
and forgot it the very next day.  There is nothing I want more
than to swim laps and crochet scarves and write bad poems and
become void of all the information that I currently hold.

I want to forget that I knew you.
I want to forget that I thought I loved you.
I want to forget my attachment to you so it won’t
hurt as bad now that you’re
                                                   ( d e a d ) .

The past few weeks have been mounted in hot pink and mahogany.
Hot breath; sticky and drooling,
dogs up the glass and
I resist the urge to
outline my name in a one-finger, window-fade, Arabic script-
I can’t keep my giddy heat
and roasting hands to myself.

My thoughts pirouette a coconut,
slippery-sweet meld of dazed concentration while I leprechaun-leap over cool evening sidewalks
and tip-toe in stairwells for that
last fevered kiss
as the heavy door
crashes shut and we're still alone.

The hole in my boot sole
grows with each step;
I feel the full magnitude of
each drying leaf as I go forth and pulverize.
I don’t think I can help it-
The leaves fall and the fall
falls and I might be falling.

These days have been oil paint
thick and layered inches high
on expensive canvas, on the
cardboard I've plucked from the
dumpster at work.
The smell of thin trees
and bright fields;
combing out and
rinsing off
and tucking
themselves in for winter naps,
cradle the breeze and
bellow a
proud conquest with its sweet,
smoky hum.

My own long, dark,
hair is lured up and around by grinning wind.
Earth waltzes with the bits of me I've let grow.
Hair is dead, right?
(and the longer the deader.)
In my long, soft, dead parts I am waving free-
finally free and laughing.

I’m laughing because nothing is tangled;
nothing stings yet.
I’m laughing because if--
When,
this ride crashes
I can't imagine how I'll
survive the wreck.

Because I'm caught on the details;
the tiny everythings that get me.
The little choices made
(but so sweet-muted,
they're not printed in the script.)
They are dull-pencil-scribbled in later
by an actor who’s fading fast into
a calmy, balmy, dreamless sleep.

Still, they're the bloom-blushing afterthoughts that catch me
off guard and whip my guts up
warm and oozing.
They stick in my throat horizontally,  clawing and breached.

I acknowledge them softly
and play like this easy
kindness is not
completely foreign to me.
I’m carefully absorbing.
I'm mutely, blinking back
slow-welling eyes
because this feeling of unworthy
coiled deep in my bones
is too rooted, too tangled,
too stutter seep quaking
through my marrow
to just shake off.

But I am trying.
I’m quietly,
radically,
hiking a mountain to
meet him halfway-
desperately hoping he won’t *****.

I’m dizzied and melting to the throwaway habits I’m
beginning to crave.
How his fingers pray the rosary
on each bead of
my cracking knuckles.
How he kisses my head when I'm looking at my phone and thinks I don’t notice.
How lately, the sleepy way
I let my posture disintegrate into his body,
(a place that's sun-stained and velvet.
a place that's formed and transformed endlessly across decades and continents)
feels like graceful landing after so much turbulence.

I've met moments of calm locked in limbs and new security in the shapes my fingers find tangling with his.

Even glances can anchor me. A sip of his eyes-
eyes that have shown him so much of the world;
the bright corners and ***** streets,
the graveyards and parades,
the sidewalk saints and stumbling souls,
a world he knows can be beautiful and horrific
and both and neither all at once-
those glances manage to steady the sway
of my tangled body and droop-heavy soul.

and okay, I don't see poetry in
the way I swing myself up;
arm, leg, arm, leg,
into the front seat of his truck while
he closes the door behind me-
(my own faded muscles stopped atrophying
months before I could even remember his name,
but calves and obliques still recall the sensation
of ripping, pinching and splitting
like raw cotton in the presence
of heavy metals and four wheel drive.)

Still, there is something
almost too easy to weave
into words about the
smell of soap on his chest even
late at night and how there-
right there,
is a small island
to double over in laughter
or sigh your stress aloud.
With the tiny details
and subtle quirks I’m
shorthand jotting and jacket-pocket folding
it'd be too easy
to fill a notebook.

And though I'm still treading lightly,
I think if you asked me
to describe the word ‘worth’
right now,
I’d probably tell you about the way
I can pull away, look up and smile during a kiss
and find his eyes already in mine,
smiling back.

Now days, they were better, I slept even deader
I woke up when everyone left
Didn’t feel a touch, not for over a year
From anyone outside of my own head
Please let me know if this is even a life
Is it something else?
Dying just a little let’s meet in the future
Or maybe you won’t, I’m boring you don’t
I’m sad you’re magical, he think’s your beautiful
I think you’re beautiful too

Get up, get out, be social
I really had to force myself to go
Come on, get up, because it’ll be alright
My veins pump with adrenaline
When I talk to the ones I admire
It might be someone older
Someone about to leave

Now would you stay, right here?
Your velocity is too high and I can’t keep up
I don’t know you too well, and we don’t have much time
I want to hang around, I make an awful sound, some eyeliner lines on the shade
I don’t care for your mistakes, or the capsules you ate
We all have a problem, that’s why we’re here
We all want to smite the negative parasites and ignite the frozen hearts
You’re not perfect, and neither am I
So I’d like to get to know you, before I have to say goodbye

This school is no longer black and white
Why? Because you’re all colorful
Way more colorful than the kids who has a drunk problem purely because it looks cool
You’re singing it for the deaf, dancing for the blind
And even though they can’t interpret it they can feel it
You act for the depressed, you play for the addict
You make them forget what problems that have

Now in a month, you’ll leave us, like a phantom in the summer
But before you go, I’d like to meet you
It’s weird to say this, but I’d really like to
I’m weird, you should know that by now
We are the kids from yesterday
I know you can’t stay, so I have one thing left to say
I’d really like to meet you, and even though you can’t stay
Right here, right now, in this bonus stage
I respect you, I desire you, I’d like to meet you. Why? Because every snowflake is different, just like you.

I believe her to be insane
because she's listing her requirements
and I've managed to meet most of them,
but I'm still her Windex-ed glass window

I believe her to be insane
because she claimed she was jocking me
though she'd only met my voice
and lived near my Cali family

I believe her to be insane
because she liked me when she annoyed me
and was quick to end the years
after I said she was skinny

I believe her to be insane
because she could be straight up with everyone,
but whenever it came around to us
her mouth remained completely shut

I believe her to be insane
because I was more natural than her ex
Then suddenly she became work-obsessed,
but found time to marry the ex

I believe her to be insane
because she ******* up her life to get my attention
She was always beautiful, but deader inside
Another stereotypical trailer park girl

I believe her to be insane
because she searched the mall parking lot
to leave a bocay of daises
on the windshield of my car

I believe her to be insane
because she sang "Before You Walk Out of My Life"
more beautifully than Monica herself
exclusively to me late at night

I believe her to be insane
because she walked miles to see me at work
with bruised, sore, raw feet
to be somewhere safe away from him

I believe her to be insane
because she let me go in a heartbeat,
then she pleaded for my forgiveness,
then she let me go in another heartbeat

I believe her to be insane
because our poetry complimented perfectly,
but I wasn't the one she pictured
because of not being the desired ethnicity

I believe her to be insane
because she cherished me so much,
poetically revealed me to be the catch,
but she's the one that lost touch

I was always told to stay away from the street
Keep myself protected, redirecting my feet
The traffic rushing past would **** me deader than dead,
that's what the old folks said
But little did I know that by avoiding the cars
I wandered in the path of something badder by far
Keeping to the fences and the gardens to play
That made me easy prey
For the houses, on the prowl
The houses, on the prowl
The windows, are a hungry scowl
And the doors are jaws to swallow you down

Ever seen a picture of a venus-trapped fly?
Happy as a clam as if it's ready to die
Sucker for the honey never knowing it's bait
Until it's far too late
Well comfort and protection are what houses pretend
A welcome sanctuary and a fabulous friend
We lavish love upon them like they're part of ourselves
Until there's nothing else
But the houses, on the prowl
The houses, on the prowl
The windows, are a hungry scowl
And the doors are jaws to swallow you down

People at the window, haunted and confused
Something's got them prisoner, and it'll never let them loose

I know that you will think it's just a travellers' tale
Like Jonah or Gepetto in the guts of a whale
But they were brought salvation from the soul of the sea
And that's never come to me
Helplessly protesting at the ribs of the room
Quietly digesting in a wallpaper tomb
It's hard and getting harder to get out of the door
And the world don't care no more.

i just want to keep writing about you forever
i have so many things to say about you
so many things left to tell you
how much i loved you,
how much you changed me...
but honestly, i think i just write to pretend you never left...

Panic attacks are like deathless suicides
****.

You're deader than a dead man because unnatural fasts
unnatural- fasts
solipsist dizz-
solipsist sip, mizz?
burn the boardwalk and walk the beach *** all of a sudden
life is too short to fuckit, later.

everything has to slither out like Satanic snakes offering the half-bitten apple
to Adam *** he got the other bit stuck in his Adams Apple and suddenly lost his voice,
** **, take that, prophecies of God!

Too tired to be the  metaphysical rebel licking the slug slime off your toes as if you deserve the luxury,
smile again and I'll call you the prettiest pervert to ever strip down to your socks.

this is what a broad mind is,
I write this assuming weirder thoughts have flickered in your ******* lightbulb.

As trite and gray as words
become with time, my heart
becomes an ashen leaf
in fall; or kitschy art;

or something even deader,
as old coals, so far abstract
from life that words should give
them meaning; In fact,

that I might be troubled
to convey this worthless stuff,
I find the lackingness of language
barely dead enough.

el sol va tocar la lluna i amb els ulls brillants que compartien una
paradoxa amor, es va convertir en el seu conjunt
es va torçar en una essència sota els llençols de les tenebres al
nostre espai infinit
the world whispered the simple phrase into my ample
body, frigid in the sense mentally and physically
I cant get enough of this new comer
I feel the verses in my poetry have became
more real when words are enveloped in
a character of no moral restraints
I am more real now, I feel full
yet my emptiness is there on the side
I need that, and its understood - every human does
wholesome
grateful
the living dead are fully
alive now, and I have let
the deader parts of me fade away
with the turning of time
I have a new sheet of skin upon my body
I have new eyes peering at the world
with the stare of a pale ****** who has
yet to be touched by the sun
just coming out of my mothers womb
you see
I am born again
I breathe for the first time
and I love genuinely
I throw my arms in the sky
and I bathe myself in the wind
of this foreigner whom soon
I will give my body to
and you will grow along me
the clouds move above me like a
euphoric dream of melodies
and I feel the rush of the universe
come down on me like a huge raindrop
and I am cleansed
and I am free
and I am love
the smell of wet wood in the park
suffocates me with its natural joy
and I lay on the grass and peer
into the lakes of life and
the mysteries they hold, I cannot
wait to find out the riddles
and listen to the new rhymes to come
welcome new year

I want you to understand
every strand of hair on my body is in pain
my blood is a knife
flowing through me
secretly whispering your name to my skin
and my skin burns and falls like ash

my sheets are stained with the deader parts of me
my body lays on the bed
and in the dark hallway
I am peering into the room
watching the love rot away
and decay

the moon burries itself into the sun
and I bury myself into everything I cant reach
and I sink so
so
deep

will you create those little things
when you look back and think of all the memories
like a picture
old snap shot
tattered edges


wearing all white I hold my breathe
next to the massive body of water
Im made out of salt
and I melt on the lips of the winds
the humidity is staining my fingertips
and Im closing my eyes immersing in the
dysphoria of all of this

finally
posture comes to my bended bones
when I realize I am a waterfall
stuck in the drawer of an old mahogany vinaty set
laying somewhere in a abandoned house years
and ages away
miles and miles far remote from this place
I stare in haste


I collaborate with the atoms around me
the molecules that form my wasted id
Im a child, my hands are still small
but they are rough

Im at the park, its the closest I can get to my seed
the dirt that I am made out of
cause nothing here is natural anymore
take me away please
somewhere where I can walk on history
not in a land were the worst genocide took place
an annihlation that was dressed in a costume
oh no it was a cleansing

I rather walk on gravel
broken roads
then on fresh paved streets

I rather live in the forest
than in this so called democracy

So pleasant was the weather
a summer spent together
she's *****-trapped with pleasure
sensations in great measure
To you, she was a treasure
but today there's nothing deader
than the tingles in your head or
the fantasy to wed her.

Tell me of her touch
like earthquakes in foreign lands
that you can feel between
your legs
like ocean water churning, churning
falling upon you when you're burning
from a sky so vast, it seems
that your dreams are pauper's dreams
She's like that same sky in the night
so dark... so bright
your eyes are alight
with infinity in sight
and you take a bite
of her honey cream thighs
you feel alone
and then she sighs
and you are responsible
it's like some living math
you plus her
in a bubbling bath
equals roiling memories
that cage as much as free,
freeze as much as warm.

What choice do we have?
Life is a choice of slave masters...
Be enslaved by love,
or dominated by hate:
either way, there's pain.
Either way, there's a rain so fierce
all the world is swept away,
but you and she, she and you,
you can never be erased,
for you are not earth and tree;
you are not river and rock;
you are spirit:
a thing proved unconquerable by death.

So, after life, when there is time to linger,
think upon the touch that tingles.
Heaven waits for all men,
each woman a
piece of
it.

These shoes of mine
Have been run through
Their very soles.
Crossroads after crossroads;
Days passing me by
As I venture into old age.
Twenty years ago,
The likes of me was
Deader than dead.
No tombstone could mark
Where I pitched my mortal stead.
Now I'm retired from the stateless
Womb,
Walking down paths that promise
A way to an earthly tomb.
My soul though,
I bet she'll always wander on.
For all I know,
Two halves of me have already met.
Perhaps it's her I sleep with at night,
She'd hold me tight as I wept softly.
Now we laugh while the world
Struggles to comprehend
That our lives are connected
Through love,
Paths intertwined
Till the very end.

And to me you were a flower that I wanted to press between the pages of my heart
So that I could keep you forever and so your memory would not be too far away
Yet each time I opened up to find you, you became more delicate and deader than the moment I plucked you
It horrified me to know I was that sort of person to ruin something so alive

I read with passing interest
The death of the
Field Marshal’s son--
Manfred Rommel--
Gone at 84.
His father—The Field Marshal,
Had been given a choice:
Commit suicide or
Face a rigged trial
Charged with conspiring to ****
******.
If he chose the trial, they said,
They could not promise
That his family would be
SAFE.
The father,
Der Feldmarschall,
Bit into a cyanide pill
And died quickly.
It was Oct. 14, 1944.

Thanks to the sacrifice,
Manfred got to grow up to be
A three-term mayor of Stuttgart,
Where Daimler-Benz makes cars.
Manfred Rommel:
A postwar liberal Deutschland voice,
Supporting immigrants and Jews.
At 84,
Deader than
A dreadnaught.

Makes you wonder?
A fate worst--wurst--
Something worse than
Death?
Really the moment of truth
For any honorable man,
Self-defined by nature,
Molded by nurture.
Family:
The fountain & source
The tribe you belong to.
Family:  everything you are
When you get right down to
Where one’s loyalties
Supposedly lie.

Of course, you opt for suicide.
Wouldn’t anyone?
We are born into a net.
We must bravely defend the network.
Facing insurmountable odds,
Our duty is to hold on
Without hope, without rescue,
Like that Roman centurion
Whose bones,
Later excavated at that front door in Pompeii,
Steadfast & true,
That Roman soldier--
Vesuvius exploding,
A hard rain falling down upon him--
Died at his post because
They forgot to relieve him.
That is duty.
That is greatness.
That is thoroughbred pedigree.
An honorable end:
The one thing that
Cannot be taken from a man.
Unless, of course,
The times they are Orwellian,
And once again,
This time with feeling:
*“Do it to Julia.
Do it to Julia!”

I woke today
tired, worn, drained
as if I had slept to the point of exhaustion
only to wake to an even deader city
for all I saw were zigzag avenues
and twisted streets
and broken boulevards
that led to nowhere
but dead ends.

Fill your lungs with air, they say
These black fireworks are getting closer
Crawl around, it's fun, they say
The slower I move, the deader the knot gets
You're dizzy, shadowed, they say
Apple after apple, only glowing poison

You'll see, you'll see
You'll want to someday
But all I want is out.

An intrepid outsider just visiting London,
Smitten, dazzled, by stunning illuminations,
From within a black cab, transporting me,
Not only weaving in present day airy streets,
But through stacked layers of storied history;
Some dark, treacherous and dastardly sinister,
Some light, celebratory and blithely triumphant.

On alighting from the Hackney Carriage,
(use of the word ‘carriage’ emphasising
a vivid stretch of a willing imagination.)
Museum of London beckons, offering pleasure,
Absorbing a tableau of delightful treasure,
Engaging unfettered thoughts and feelings,
Absorbing echoed cries of distant past eras,
Reminders of who we were and who we are,
Plunging archaic depths of vicarious displays,
Delicate fingers pressing upon vibrant pulses,
Within this webbed tomb of sanitised decadence.

In the coolness of encroaching night,
She slumbers, this anchored sprawling behemoth,
Suffering barking dogs, wailing of infants,
Sweet kisses of lust in cardboard-strewn alleys,
Screeches from a gaggle of hen-partying girls,
Screams from urban foxes, cries of a feral cat,
Curtailed by hurried rumble of clattering steel,
Train arteries busy pumping, wheel to wheel,
Ferrying the masses, crammed together classes,
Silent tubes exposing the numbness we feel,
At destinations end our tensions slyly unpeel.

Busy pedestrians skirting human detritus;
Shunning, vagabonds, tramps and thieves,
Amidst intermittent beeps of frantic car horns,
Squealing brakes and hot roaring engines,
She encompasses this amorphous miasma,
Towering skyward, snaking deep underground,
A blaze of coloured light, her own silent sound,
Inhabitants ‘pigged together’ the majority above,
But many, ignored and mistreated, surviving below,
Recognised, yet avoided; pretending, not to know.

Ancient sewers, dead rivers and even deader bones,
As far back as hunter gathers, howling and rutting,
Stout wooden pilings, now sodden river sentinels,
Whilst fire-blackened-pain from early conflagrations,
Blaze through time, ashes of destruction, no deterrent,
Romans plying trades in walled Londinium’, aye,
Emotional fingerprints etched into carved stone,
Resilient through Viking and Saxon times alike,
She survives, strives and thrives, our proud Lady,
Welcoming all, galleons, tea clippers and schooners,
Surging through her carotid artery, such spoils,
For the Big Smoke, tea houses and coffee shops,
Parks and palaces, bridges, tunnels and hovels,
Where now, the bedecked Town Crier? Is all well?

Brash glitz and glamour of threatened Tin Pan Alley,
Cultural elite behind facades of Doric columns,
While Roman foundations bold form, hold firm,
Twisting through the underneath, far beyond forever,
London crunches into the future, unstoppable,
Embracing humanity in a technological fervour,
She adapts, snarls, struts, proud and confident,
Akin to a sentient beast lapping up our needs,
Feeding desires, never judging, only accepting.

My very being saturated within this teeming city,
Of the city, I’m now enmeshed in the infrastructure,
Heart, mind and spirit willingly shackled, captivated by,
Cold agglomeration of steel, glass, concrete and stone,
Wreathed in transient emotions of warm flesh and bone,
Giving and breathing life unto all, even me,
An intrepid outsider just visiting London.

She finds you a few steps from the deck
A necklace of death is bound tight round your neck

A gasp and a scream are heard aloud
Around her mind forms a dark cloud

Your eyes are open, they look so dead
There's a purplish hue to your head

The rivers of blood didn't make you feel better
And now you couldn't be any deader

It seemed you were certain of what to do
And now your sister longs for you

She guesses you had to much to feel
And she's sorry she couldn't help you heal

She thinks back on every word she said
Saying, "that might be why you're dead."

You were her light, her truest friend
But your life has come to an end

She can't live this life without you
So she decides to be dead too

She scrambles up the stairs with hope
"Maybe there's another rope."

Her hand feels the frayed string
Finally she's found the thing

Tears run quicker down her face
And her heart begins to race

She sets back up the stool you kicked
Ready to feel the rope constrict

She take a breath and steps on up
The cuts on your arm weren't cleaned up

She reaches up behind her head
And touches the blade with a sense of dread

She draws the last cut she will ever make
Deep and without caution, feeling the ache

Blood dripping, she grabs the noose
She tries to stop herself, its no use

She moves the noose around her neck
She knows her life was just a wreck

She kicks the little stool away
Wishing you had chosen to stay

She struggles to take her final breath
But finding comfort in oncoming death

Her heart rate is beginning to slow
Your dead eyes are the last thing she'll know

Her final breath is a quiet sigh
This is her last and final goodbye

Her last heart beat is an empty thump
And her shoulders lightly slump

From you she could not be apart
So now you both have a still heart