Abandon

i will leave you

to sleep with your demons

though it saddens me

to go

the cracks in the glue

that bound us together

seem to spell out

 "removal"

every breath you take

is closer to your last

and it's a seduction

i cannot watch

maybe your Legion

will keep you warm

after i've gone

Otis Welcomes Them To the Neighborhood

jungle grazing lattice neighborhood hunting spasm forget enough displace crater safe words

i am in the jungle and the jungle is in me

but we are all just sheep a-grazing

i see you there, peering through the lattice 

welcome to the neighborhood

don't see what you want, well let's go hunting

feeling a spasm of remorse?

don't let's forget, you wanted this ride

there's enough room here for all of us

so no one ever need be displaced

from the empty bliss of this crater 

truly there is safety in numbers

but we are only words

S.W.B. & Otis

window happens made hand bright math repetitions bland vacancy boundary against animal

i see thru the window of your old soul
what happens when they get that close?
you weren't made for making connections
your hand wasn't made to hold


isn't it bright, and isn't it lucky
that no one here can do the math
they fail to see your murderous repetitions
and you keep so bland
but there is no vacancy behind your eyes

i will cross the boundary of your stare, though
i've got nothing against being afraid
or coming unglued and wild, like an animal

For Love Of Otis

love, verbiage, bone, sing, working, magic, gone, ideas, dead, cake, squatting, passage

funny how love
is expressed with such verbiage, inundating all that we know
sunken into the marrow of our bones
we sing it into existence
working it with our hands into some ethereal sculpture
that we imbue with manufactured magic
Logic is ignored so often, it has gone,
leaving us to our neon pink ideas of servitude
self-preserving selfishness is dead
we served it as a cake
to Love, that fat beast squatting over us
our best version of a passage to Somewhere where we see ourselves as More

Epilogue.

"I remember Autumn," she murmured, twining a dark curl around her finger.

"Where I come from, there is a certain time of the year

when the trees exchange green clothes for jewel coloured ones. 

Rich reds, coppers, lush yellows...

You would have to see it to believe." 

And in her mind's eye, she was there, gazing over the mountains

wearing their brilliant colours.

A breeze brushed her cheeks like a cobweb. 

It was crisp with the promise of winter and

bittersweet in its warmth, like the whispers of new love.

But like love, it just wouldn't last, 

and she couldn't figure out how to hold it,

or make it stay.

She turned her back to him,

hot tears collecting under her closed lids.

He propped up on his elbow,

wanting to touch her and bring her back.

But he could not reach her where she was,

or get to wherever she was from.

She was already gone.

Transitio/Transitus

in the midst of it
in the thick of it

iron is sharpening iron
grinding away at my bones


i'll be something different, utterly
when i'm through


the changes working in me
are as numerous as my cells,
swelling and filling every pore of my skin


excising, excising
what is no longer useful
what has festered and rotted
and now makes me ill


i'll emerge on the other side
senses keened and focus sharper
but all my angles will have melted
softer

 

Eat Life

i am always

jealous

of bright, shiny

futures

of sparkling

nows

and sepia

yesterdays

descriptions of things

get me and

elicit

Pavlovian salivation:

Venetian glass, hammered copper

French knots

appetite voracious

so unbecoming

a lady

i know i could not

eat it all

but would not

mind dying

of the effort.