I. Phasmophobia
I am the innumerable gloom of dim, long-buried anthems.
In wistful suspension, I shadow over a living loft in silence.
Tethered between lines, my fog bleeds on panes in knocking
Hawking your dimming faces in the lamplight of my genesis.
Torn the tunnels of their astringed throats, a requiem is reaped.
— ”I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous at the edge of your vision.” -Cynthia Huntington

II. Claustrophobia
I am the small match ignited from the depths of your mind.
My walls blanched absent of evacuation, self invite into
Your personal and private violation, invading every fissure
With icy burns, solidifying your chrysalis on hungry bark.
Your frozen God of smothering doom, a willow devours you.
— “But then I remember the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really no where else to go.” -Peter Watts

III. Ommetaphobia
I am the stricken, scarlet cloth coalesced of cruelty and ichor.
These rawboned talons, cloaked thereof, overtake embrace—
In coarse delight— a piety of prisoners’ silver stark sights.
Perceptive cavities leak my garb as my artistic blade sweeps.
Plucked from the dredges of a briny skull, two diamond orbs.
— ”The hearts hushed secret is in the soft, dark eye." -Letitia Elizabeth Landon
.
IV. Monophobia
I was the cherished friend to you, my twine stitched in your grasp.
A golden balloon unaffected by tides of time and distorting gales.
Alas from this intimate atmosphere shot an arrow, poisonous
Where silently I erupt into a missing memory upon the wind.
As your curtains close, you breathe for me, without a hand to hold.
—”And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.” -Edgar Allan Poe

V. Arachnophobia
I am the legion of soundless beholders aloft your dormant dreams.
An itch scattered over the crooked spine, arid for pulsing melodies.
This fruitful sapling beckons each dark, angular limb near your neck.
As my lighting strikes erratically, your foolish impulse slow to clutch
Creeping necrosis bestowed by the guardian who claimed your home.
—”The Spider taketh with her hands and is in king’s palaces.” -Proverbs 30:28.

VI. Agoraphobia
I am the ancestral abductor of this rotting womb you deem a shelter.
As the embryo held within, I contract you into tides and bid ‘swim’.
Directions devoid, beyond bolted doors, you plummet to my depths
Where you wish for comforts’ wind but mislaid the method to breathe.
My otherworld encompasses you, whilst I drink in your suffocating.
— ”Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” -William Thackeray

VII. Ecclesiophobia
I am the black shepherd in martyric masque and a mitre casque.
A discrete imminent sheep cowers, hanging on the hook in my gallery—
My chalice congregates your pure liquor of laments for libertine luxury.
I rise where you fall and smother the lantern of your last mortal minutes
Instilling final grace in the stillness of your veins, my kingdom reigns eternally.
— ”Suffering can be a gift.” - Abbie Bernstein.

Your travel has given me freedom.

But what is freedom when

you possess a soul divided?

What is the chronic sea without

its unfathomable dominions?

My soul is thirsty for you.

My cold and naked ankles mope

around your desolated castle;

Jinn, dust, and piercing silence is all that echoes

in this darkened dungeon that I have succumbed to.

And then there is me.

A heavy-laden wasted artist with

Spiny paintbrushes and faded color.

I refuse to leave the spaces that you read and play.

I refuse to exhale the memories of your sky painted blue irises.

My skin hungers for your delicate surface.

My teeth long to bite into your fleshy thighs.

In the hour of the noontide I feel you most

For our souls sahasrara blooms colorfully in the hour

Of the sun-the ancient mother of our roots weaves  

Love with all of loves children and meets us with pneumatic cosmic kisses.

This is when I feel closest to you.

Without you, the world is just as it seems;

the sun burned into cinders,

Leaving the crops belonging to the sacred

soils of my flesh to prune and wither .

Ay! the droughts that you spread with your distance.

These are the days of my reaping

These are the days of my sulking.

The gardens are now closed and the

black raven cries out to a mournful mothers son.

Your scent died along with the laughter of the flowers

And the butterflies wont even flutter

Without your lovely eyelash kisses.

To live another day without the energy

Your presence fills my heart with,

Is to live an eternity hugging

Your coffin with sobbing rage;

fain would I take deaths hand.

The suffering of your glorious dawn

Wedded the universe deep beneath my skin.

You are the light,

And the absence of your holiness

leaves me opaque and hollow.

In my solitude I have watched the hours burn

And in each hour your fragrant sighs

escape with the dust motes

Surrounding the beaming light that

breaks through the cracks of the curtains.

I sit in the depth of myself

And listen for the echoes of your sounds.

A mother am I and a pitiful one too.

Like the rawboned mother with sunken eyes

carrying a baby in the womb, draining all of

the nutrition her body has to offer,

Your distance maps a massacred trail

Of my health and happiness.

You are the mother of patience

And the descendent of beauty and love.

You are the tsunami, and the still waters.

You are the uprising cub leading and mending.

You are the sap that feeds the giving tree of life.

You are the prince of wisdom.

You are

My flesh

In purest form.

- Arizona

\put your feet on the land/

His name, according to the scrawl on the cover of his journal, was Viele. His build, according to everyone he'd ever met, was a lazy mosaic of withered limbs; veins snaking like cracks in pavement.

His intentions, according to hindsight, were regrettable.

\and see/

It is the gospel truth that man is the expert of denial.
As sure as the dead stay dead,
The Graverobber will prefer the term 'opportunist'.
Viele was a "professional",
took pride in his "art".
He dug, dug, dug,
'til the wood did part.

Stripped the cemetery to its bones (or, if you please, of its bones).

\ain't no grave/

Then Viele snags his shovel, about three feet deep.
Somehow the handle asphyxiated by the stalk
Of a Morning Glory, which flowers a defiant blue -
swallowing whole, the rusting *****, as its spiral buds take
their first breaths - against, of course, the tarred lung
of their rawboned abuser.

And lo!
(the image befits the phrase, as does the Earth "empty of form")*
the deadyard stood guard,
erupting
like it was suddenly attacked
by an impressionist's paintbrush.

The deadyard, and Viele
Van Goghing, Goghing, Gone.

\gonna hold my body down/

In Lieu, In Bloom:
Baby's Breath and Bells of Ireland and Daisies and Hydrangeas and Lace of Queen Anne and Sunflowers and
God, ad nauseum they arose,
arching upwards from graves.
Leaving no gravestone unturned,
in the pursuit of the place
where footnotes become headlines
and headlines turn to deadlines
and deadlines turn to soil.

For in the morning,
when Viele returns
and Glory, ironically, stands down
(slash-stands-us-up)
we will know to wait.
Tucked away behind our rejected Heaven's gate,
for the show to return.

Where there's Life in the urn.