Will a Phoenix doused in water reignite?
Should the Sun ever disturb the night?
As my eyes take their rest my mind takes flight
Then quickly plummets straight into blight
Straight into sorrow; reigniting my rage
And keeps me awake as if it were day
Awake to write my story/Awake to dwell on the last page
How dare I wallow over someone engaged?
Great Leviathan, Demon God of water and life
Lend me your strength as I overcome this strife
Baptize me in your waters and revitalize my sight
Clear away all the salt and callus to turn my scleras white
Drown the anger in my heart; cease its return!
**** the Phoenix, for its presence burns!
Drown the Sun so that the moon may take its turn
Allow my brain to rest so that I may have the capacity learn
How to fully move on…

I have two scars on my face; neither one's very visible anymore. One I received at age three (late 1992), falling face-first into a dry riverbed on my first camping trip. I landed hard, my forehead colliding with a crescent-shaped rock. I remember my father turning me over, my vision going red, the blood flowing into my scleras and pupils. The rock missed my right eye by millimeters.  When J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997 my peers began calling me "Harry." Dark-haired, bespectacled, similar scar -- whole package. My comeback: "They should call Harry Potter 'Chris Gorrie', I had the scar first." Not until ten years later, when The Deathly Hallows was released, did I realize Harry was "born" in 1980.

something heretical in our sera
a peeking thing, half mischievous
and i, trying to see if you are my mirror if you
recognize the streak in me as your own something familiar smelling like the sweat beneath your arms the
glossy glint off your scleras the
trail of forest on your body
heretical
something wild in the the skin that slips beneath my hands like a
many-worn silk of some old god like a
selkie would feel about the centuries old earth and the
neverchanging of days, darkbrightdarkbrightdark

something freeing about the sting of winter air in my nostrils something
ripped away from my long exiles in the city something
replenished in the true empty fullness of a silent tundra a
dirt-covered snowbank a
grey iceflow on the water something
dissident and infidel about your soul and mine together something
potent in our marrow something
wild and
freeing and

dying

1.
It's odd Time never came
To wonder under these beaches' loam,

To walk forty steps to a tide
Where sea-green foam flashes full its blade.

     2.
     Trammeled like a nun, the girl
     Swept by me thoughtless. A root's gnarl

     Could symbolize slim pain
     Beneath the scleras: two jackals' den.

     3.
     Hurt inwardly, like darkened stars,
     So bursting silence is all one hears.

4.
The monotony of this shoreline is a throwback.
What phantoms come: an electric shock.

Why ten years ago is all I know
Is not half as important as who or how.

5.
The autumnal tremor, the rainless moonlight...
Memories of little weight....

no longer sheathed by the living skin of the land
ancients of the deep shriek in unholy abhorrence
as they make their rapturous ascent to the heavens,
seeking not salvation that they’ve forsaken,
but the evisceration of a former home.
it is malice not earthly tar that stains
bulging scleras and hissing pulses
placated only by wine tastes of sin.
these apparatuses remain ever silent
to eternally bask in the presence of Her.
Her who invokes the name of salvation.
Her, melichrous.
Her, scintillant.
composed of polished crystal embellishments
must have the creature once relinquished
the bipedal form to humanity in exchange
for spherical inconvenience.
renounced and disdained
by the possessors of illusory superiority
the mousy predecessors of righteousness
trod lightly through emotional labyrinths
only seeking to sate their vampiric empathy.
Her seeks this suffering of the corrupt
where the must be bound in crude scales
packed amongst their parasitical kin.
alexia unbound wreaks havoc in their stead
manifesting in serpentine coils which match
the tongue slithers out cryptic hymns.
Her must and will be subject to judgement,
durum hoc est sed ita lex scripta est.
and does this serpent mimic the rhythmic
folding to suit its needs as Her is bound
once more to the Mire
never to breach the heavenly dome
void of living skin wrappings.