Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philae, in and out,
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow,
And our words arrows
To shoot the stars
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.

But you there beside me—
Oh, how shall I defy you,
Who wound me in the night
With ******* shining
Like Venus and like Mars?
The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle
As with waves above me
Blue at the prow of my desire.

Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philae, in and out,
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow,
And our words arrows
To shoot the stars
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.

But you there beside me—
Oh, how shall I defy you,
Who wound me in the night
With ******* shining
Like Venus and like Mars?
The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle
As with waves above me
Blue at the prow of my desire.

II.
To love pales in comparison of being loved,
but to love and be loved in turn?
Truly puissant, indeed.

III.
Though on the thread of life, the ink will spill
but never fades away. Now I see. If all I am
is to be nothing but a memory, the least
I can do is to make it a good one for the
future seeds.
Memory can slip and slide, but these words,
my words, that I have painted will remain.

Liz,
    I saw you on Christmas
    at church in a black dress and pearls
    we made light conversation
    as we fill filed out with the postlude
    
    31 days later, an ambulance picked you up from your friends house
    there were no lights, there were no sirens
    the obituary told me it was an accidental ****** overdose
    you were 21
    I wish i had seen the bruises on your arm that christmas
    before I walked into the snowy night

Liz,
      your funeral was held at the same church where I saw you last
      where we spent all these years
      as the postlude drew to a close
      we studied the back of wooden pews
      we asked ourself the  same question
      "Would I have been able to help?"
      we beg the walls for answers
      but they offer no reply

Liz,
     If I saw the bruises, would I have known?
     If I had known, would I have the courage to say anything?
     What would I have said?
  
    I could've given you a scared-straight talk
    with warnings and statistic
    shown you before and after pictures
    ripped from a health textbook
    but spitting facts into the face of an addict
    is like lecturing someone of the dangers of riptides
    when they're six miles from shore
    rambling about 3rd degree burns
    to someone trapped in a burning house
    but how do I keep forgiving from becoming ignoring?
    how do I stop helping from bordering on ratting out?
    I want to to get help but I don't want you to resent me
                God, what I would give
                for you to hate me right now

Liz,
      my mother discussed your passing
      with friends with red wine lips
            "Oh, Liz? Yeah- my son said she was a ****** kid"
      a ****** kid, not the pastor's daughter
     or the mission trip veteran,
     not the day care teacher, or the prankster,
     not the angel in the 2006 Christmas play
    
     Where is the line between good and bad?
     how many track marks does it take to turn a girl into a statistic?
     how far in must one drive the needle to be reduced
     to the trope of a ****** kid
     how many melted milligrams does it take to wash away the good qualities
     and leave behind a skeleton of a girl we once knew

Liz,
     they say you're gone, you're in a better place
     but God i know you're still here
     I see you in the flowers, skirting the steps of the church
     I hear you between the harmonies
     of all the hymns
     I can feel your presence
     breathing out from the cracks in the stone walls
     I see you in coffee shops
     and in restaurants and on the streets
     mocking me to do a double take
     before I remember
     and you know we have forgiven you
     as we have wailed it at the stained glass
     I really hope you have learned to forgive us

Liz,
     I saw you christmas eve
     black dress and pearls
     you died 31 laters
     you were 21
     I wish I had seen the bruises on your arm
    I wish I could've helped

Somewhere along the way I lost you
In a crowd of a hundred
Waited for you to find me too
But that's not what you did
Is it me imagining you said I love you
Did we not talk all through the night
You never kissed me
Or told me it'd be alright
Music takes you away from me
Even when it's the one thing
That connects us and let's us fall in love
Without lyrics but I guess that's never enough
I'm lost in the rhythms
And you already played the song
I was a piece that you played
without the notes there's no reason for you to stay

The time numbs. I want it raw like it was.
Like ******* and ******.
Something powerful and honest.

I let lies continue.
Fantasies I tease myself with.
I never follow these potential trails.
I’m terrified of not having blissful reverie.
Closure haunts me. I’m scared of definition.

I live in a time that never ends.
I breath the exhaust we know but cannot see.
The world spins upon my shoulders, I pass it on without using my hands.
People die, it’s distant.
Life doesn’t mean much.

I live here in a puddle.
I love all the potential I have to waste.
I don’t know what I would slobber on without it.

I want something raw.
Something abrasive, without some sort of superficial veil.
If I brush back another thin facade just to uncover a clearer image of *******.
I’ll slump the world with my bear hands, and whatever blunt object is abreast.
The ensuing postlude or coattail if you will, is gruesome and redefines the word genocide.

Life passes by because it’s not cut with iron anymore. It’s chiseled away with fantastic stone and underlying hopeful chimes of music. A method to which leaves reality unclear, and insipid. Quite literally dull and un-vitriolic.

The time jingoes tore babies from teats, bounced sore bosoms, and buried John Doe’s in mass graves beside schools. Is long gone.

I live in a butterfly massacre.

There is something about churches—
the sanctuary filling slowly,
brass ***** pipes arrayed like halberds
in a medieval arsenal,
stooped ushers handing out programs
as the congregation
accumulates softly
like snow.

And the pulpit—like a queen
in a hive of wooden pews
all of polished walnut,
stands hushed and expectant.

(I know within that pulpit
there is a place to put cough drops,
a legal pad, second pair of glasses.)

Sanctuaries have a peculiar smell,
redolent of potted lilies,
Youth Dew perfume,
aging hymnals,
the suspired breath
of five hundred faithful
lifting their voices to that soaring
Byzantine dome.

I was glad for your presence that day,
the sound of your marvelous
voice, the warm sense
of your shoulder next to mine.
You cradled a hymnal
benevolently in your hand
as though you were baptizing a child.

"Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!"

I sang more loudly, I suppose,
for gratitude that you were with me.
I held my hymnal with more care,
sang and looked up more hopefully
to that pulpit than I might otherwise
have done on any given Easter.
I prayed more ardently for good things to happen,
thought more kindly of the man
beside me who wouldn’t make room
when we three entered the pew
but stared blandly ahead as if
waiting for an opera to begin.

When the minister spread his arms
in benediction and bade us all go in peace,
we stayed to hear the postlude
and watch the Easter crowd
wind its way to the narthex
and spill out into the boisterous
parade on Fifth Avenue.

I sat there and listened with you
as the organist played his sonorous farewell.
When I was a boy sitting next to you in church,
you might gently pat my thigh
when the organist’s final note
passed through the sanctuary
like a great bird in flight.
You would smile as if to say,
“You made it through the whole service!”

On this Easter, when the hymn began,
and the mighty ***** notes swelled around us
like God’s own voice in song,
it was the thought of your shoulder near mine,
your hands upon the pew,
that halted my singing for a moment,
to let a silent bolt of longing
pass through me
like a solitary dog crossing a road.
Then it was gone, the thought,
but so, too, was your palpable nearness,
the idea of your voice
ringing through the church
like a celebration.

it's rare, very rare that i have dream,
but sometimes it does happen,
a dolphin's nose-dive into the literal,
into the unknown, into the peaceful,
i never try to dream, but sometimes
punching a beehive reflects reality.

the content?
a cliche dream, very much a circumstance
of teenage despair,
hapless teens surrounded by the horror,
not out of vanity i will claim
the words: i am the horror.
a group of them, to my count
they number spelling out the word
S-A-N-I-T-Y (six then)
with the letters etched onto their foreheads,
i find one of the teens banging his
head on a metal door chanting some
obscure variation of a Buddhist mantra,
i am but a thick smog
   and a certainty of dasein -
a dasein of lost care and a gravity of
feeling entertained pulverising the vision...
it's a question of photon energy
in total darkness... a foxtrot sense of
spontaneity: out of nothing, out of sleep:
dreams... and given the adventure into
harnessed natural energy,
how they captured the wind with don Quixote
among cyclopean giants and wind-farms:
surely a day will come when
lightning will be harnessed, some future
Prometheus will bring down once more,
for too long lightning was ignored as engaging
our elemental techno, shrouded by a god -
what titan if not an Ōrāmetheus (oora'h me-theology /
imploring a hostile universe to think like a god:
the definition of being titan,
caged in the reality of Titus Andronicus) -
then how to harness lightning:
    the greatest favour for mankind,
   upon the altar of what's offered by either
world-by-chance or a gambling-deity;
petulence? that too; after all the world was created
out of petulence... given so many exact figurines
in mathematics, akin to the perpetual spiral of π,
all constants in science came from a petulant
argument for anything at all... a slight deviation
of the pristine Brahman's nonchalance
                 in what rhetoric could be overheard
prior to the rhetoric actual.
   then onto the reality check... can you really
read a newspaper these days seriously and not after
a whiskey-sharpshooter?
  can you live on these isles and not pretend to be
Philip Augustus playing off Scotland, Wales, England
and Ireland against each other like Henry II
John and Richard I?
                you probably can't...
                             you're either going to
gain some sense via Longshanks or the Confessor
into the dynamism... and if only Elizabeth was young
i'd say what Ali G said: bright-knockout-pokers
and edible ******* to boot...
                     but granny ****? n'ah mate, ****
that ****... i'm waiting on Charlie Chappers
              like a weasel, I R.
    but you can't read newspapers sober these days,
or what's called the 'the old get richer and the young get
poorer', the housing market... twentysomethings are
growing angry... a retired banker's daughter
is in puffy-fit frenzy of: ooh! grr!
   send in Mary 'blazin' Poppins!
                                     but it's always good to borrow
from genius... an exquisite part from *girls aloud
song the show -
            should'a known, should'a cared
should'a hung around the kitchen in my underwear
                                                                  acting like a lady
you should'a made me, oh
should'a jumped a little higher
should'a fluttered my mascara like a butterfly
instead of being lazy, that would have saved me,
and that's hardly a blue oyster gay bar sorta tune...
gay bars are weird, you end up walking in there
   and snogging some Brazilian, high on the atmosphere
    and *****; and yes,
  pop has that infectious tendency for creating
universal appeal... pop is ******* when all
other genres are *** (no one admits to it, or finds himself
boasting about it)... and find me a poncy geek
greedy with salivating overly toward tendencies of listening
to prog rock within a mile-radius from when you hear
the prelude and the postlude... because that isn't
exactly as chorus.
      in china three generations live under one roof...
in western society - should'a thrown less
                                                 teenage tantrums...
     well, isn't it humbling to actually have parents?
        cool kid, dar she blows! plonk...
timber!  if the Jews said in Poland prior to 1939
    your streets, our tenements...
   a lot of Arabs are saying of London: your streets,
our tenements... but then it could also be the nuo-rich
Russians too...                and boy... look how
the far right arose in the 20th century... here we go again.

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 hear you—
your heartbeat against
mine right down
to my toes,
arrested and captive
by your sighs
calling for me—
Closer, come closer—
Just right there,
friction over static
in each hot
draw of breath,
in each flick
of our wrists,
in wanton whispers
of sweet nothings.
Mine. Be mine.

I feel you—
I feel your wanting
in the way your voice
shakes
as my name
escapes
your lips.
Consume me. Thoroughly—
enraptured as I am
by your ecstasy;
hands leaving nothing
untouched,
tongues leaving no inch
untasted.
Take me. Take me.

I reach out,
my very fingertips
over the blurs
of your incandescent
cheeks, flushed wildly
just as I
open my mouth,
narrate my desires,
lick my lips to prepare for
yours, past pixels—
I want more.
Keep your hungry
eyes on me
and your ears
to my rapture.
Give me more.

I let go.
Any and all
inhibition
lost in
frantic
thrusting
of the hips.
This craving,
intoxicating,
lightning
running through
my head.
Pink.
Blind *******.
Coming.
I’m *******.

Let’s get lost
in this high,
the echoing symphonies
of our lust
harmonizing languidly to
the feverish commands
our shameless orchestra
of sweating flesh
performs, this duet—
Yes, yes, YES—
Our risqué masterpiece
beyond the distance,
our bodies shaking,
our smiles satisfied.
The postlude comes
in sobering silence.

I promise you:
I’m the best you’ll ever have."