They enter the café just as some sappy pop song is playing
They order then immediately hug
Embrace
Swaying to one side, together, like the wind
Encircling the leaning tower of Pisa
Then teetering to the other solstice
Foot to foot, smile to smile, hand round skirted waist
Forearm resting on his tall  blazered shoulders

This is forgivable in the young
Those teeny-boppers with defiant hair-cuts and posters
However, he has peppered hair
She, though voluptuous and tanned,
Must be in her 30s.
“Affair.”
My cynical devil snickers, between sips

But I sit mesmerized, and for the first time ever
Envious.
The chairs and the tables somehow seem more distant
The song  now sounds as if it’s funneled through some crackling phonograph
The very light disentangles itself from stones
It’s as if a sky has opened up in my chest
Flying high overhead,  one lone raven,
Its slow shadow
Gliding across my heart

Oh, how I miss you
5 states away

I see your smile on magazine covers
I vaguely sniff your scent on passing women
Yet you remain elusive - immaterial, haunting,  
While this visceral assault

Leaves me bewildered - empty
An echo in a chiaroscuro cavern  
Fading for thee

It’s a walk to be taken alone;
company is distraction in a familiar
place. I’ll set off down

the trail kept by Mother Nature,
in hope that she will welcome me
with open arms – the thick brush captures

my soul. Fighting through the grown-
up thicket and grown-out branches
to walk a once forgotten path. Alone,

I’ll tread a new territory that can leave the weak
and strong beaten alike – even thick denim
rips with the sharpest thorns. I’ll fall to my knees

but the suffering is worth the gain
as the path disentangles to confess
a sunset brighter than the one that began.

part your sea, and i swear you'll never overcome my surge.
my petulant swell of upheaval, upheld -
by the angels
of our darker thoughts, and the parody
of pure reason
where a
heart
stops.

a sudden gravity floats in a heavy seam
of dead air. it disentangles the pyramid
from the eye... severing a dot
from a matrix
but keeping the barn doors shut
should our animals
plot.

and our jailers
name it.

i have an ocean to promise you
Nothing is
sacred.

stuck in an hourglass of identity,
muffled hustling around my eyelids
head buried deep in the shifting sand,
my body wrestles with the happening

stiff legs pulled by horizontal gravity,
brain soaking, turning into electric mush
my eyes bleeding in black as it is
only in my dreams, that I can feel alive

lied naked on the slippery floor of reality,
dipped in and out of the pool of mind
fractals slowly falling off from my vision,
then swaying freely in the air

freed by a different form of mortality,
face sinking, melting into familiar figures
what's hidden below and behind evaporates
to every corner of my shut, rapid eyes

I feel every fibre of peace,
every time the world disentangles from its name
knowing they are all but shapes projected
for the hazy buzzing screen,
that is my present

It disentangles from forever where
it didn't want to be
and slips in through the bedroom door
climbs into bed with me,

Be gentle but be dreadful too
do those things that we all do

a name

made out of tears.

it slowly disentangles,
from the tiger
and his immense pacing.

a name drowned
in your paused and humid breathing.

a name
that is mine

for it sprouts
from a weeping face.

Silence seen
Is screaming hidden.
Tucked away
In a private unlit place
Designed to destroy
Impure thoughts like a virus.

Yet not far out of reach
Purposeful,
To release built up tension
Like disturbed carbonation from a can.

Excitement
Seeping
Every unguarded
Tormented region
Slowly
Disentangles

Just the thought
Provokes uproar
In mind and body

Joker is confined at Arkham State Hospital--he's an amalgamation of: Nicholson, Ledger, Phoenix.
the essence of these portrayals will fluctuate as would a possession.
the following will be written with all three in mind (no specification)--the reader is free to infer which, there is no incorrect imagining in this case of psychosis.
greener to the pasture hair, cropped short & feathered on the right side--shoulder length scraggles, that stream oil from a receding hairline on the left.
**** pillow-talk padded walls, an experimental recording studio--millenia of disassociative voices.
institutional-white disciple wear, beneath a straitjacket that can be tricked open.
he takes to contemplatively stalking the room's perimeter like John Nash's doppelganger outlining university grounds for sanity.
suddenly sawing himself into boxed halves, the pros & cons of junked minds.
then stands at attention as if absorbing the insults of a commanding officer.
he's unmuzzled, but his iconic makeup was polished off as an immaculate castration.
licking his lips like a perverted lizard, hot for his cold bloodbank--a cleaning product salesman's ear-engulfing grin.
a: Try Again mouth swallowing beanbags.
an overdeveloped feature, circled red over & over like a happy accident--boo!
a cosmetic surgeon's: Project X, a scorned *****'s unevenly applied lipstick spread around by a passionately hateful kiss.
now just a presentable choirboy with a hardon for the whole mass.
a choppy quack rolling into a chainsmoker's weepy guffaw, self-heckling giggles of bozo persistence.
a hung jury of tears snorting & spitting out antecedent laughter--reeled in by a forced seriousness that believes its deadliness.
as comfortable with one-way humor as a malfunctioning parachute, that dead silence that breeds bat symbols.
contrary to the funny wastelands of his surveillance footage, a notoriously unprivate life turning cameras on themselves.
three of a kind, says he without saying--each having explosive dance offs, while cutting into unrelated dances.
the lighting in his room is as changing slides, that look for patterns of behavior,
with a misleadingly stark evidential buildup.
a Joker--that Joker needs a smoke, that Joker stares up at the cameras, motioning to guards.
his eyes are dead set askant, with a backtracking deviance slyer than a meat hook without a carcass.
a drowsy pick-me-up, melting with baby's candy, a cocky knower of inner names.
whites like wet dreams of glory-holes.
a feminine ruefulness that signals overkill before the ****, eyes that victimize rehabilitation.
brass that will be unaccountably drawn to them like Poe's: "The Tale-tale Heart."
a gaurd un-maximizes security enough to slide a cigarette into the Joker's mouth, then removes it.
the Joker looks up & disentangles a plot of smoke--then smiles sheepishly at the gaurd.