Love of a Burnt Match

The sulfur on your breath,
from the steam rising in your chest,
off the molten lava at your core,
your the mantle I adore.
Cause a shipwreck on the shore,
killing every passenger. 
Lie beneath the bed,
feeding on the fear of loneliness;
putting nightmares in their heads
A soul taken unrequited.
Your the foul, rotten, reek,
forever debonaire and sleek,
Killing babies in their sleep.
Kissing lies into my mouth,
jarringly uncouth, as you strangle every breath
You’re the love I never left,
You’re the reason why I’m deaf.
You’re the lord of all that’s left.

A Sonnet as an Ode

A vanity she sits before, with rosy cheeks and tousled hair;
lost in a myriad of thoughts and not a care.
Reflection has entranced her there.
Entrenched in darkness behind the glass, silence speaks.
WHUMP! And little claws are scratching at the window,
startling the rose out of reverie, unfolding with a shriek.
A hoary blackbird's tattered, bloody wings, and gory beak
outside the weathered pane. The frightful bird - CAWS - sounds of woe,
as in a night-time curse, or fate in flight,
that left the rose both blind, and dumb, and mewed;
the bird began to renew. Obsidian feathers flushing bright,
and fleshing out, as all the gore and blood retreated to give it back its hue.
A curse, once upon an ancient nightingale,
now, again, an inverted virgin - is Philomel

My Legacy

A whirling, writhing, mass -"Don't fuckin' take me, I'm not fuckin' ready. You bastards!" - silhouetted murder descends around my head as I stumble into an empty lot behind an old warehouse.
Psychopomps - "I'm not a fuckin psycho!"
"No, no, no," a voice booms in letters from the specks of light dancing from the arc light on high above the lot. "Psychopomps, are here to take you away to the other place." The voice pounds through my head.
The mass settles along the tops of the arc lights, buildings and wires. All agape yet silent.
One nails on a chalkboard-crow screeched from the darkness. Then like an echo distorted, another cawes its importance and then another and another. The eerie noises dawn individually from far away and close like the approach of an invisible army and then they withdraw. A tide of terrifying black shapes move in and out like the tide. All the lot lights dim slowly to non-existence.
I feel a hand upon my shoulder, sharp and needling.
Spinning, I gasp "aw shit." Nothing there. Just the wisps of fading vapour swirling slowly off into the night. Black ink smudged on the shoulder of my shirt. "Hahahaha." The crescendo of that laugh and the oppressive feeling of amusement but not of my own weighs heavy in my chest and presses on the backs of my trembling eyes causing green and red sprites to dance in the aether. A
hurricane ripping tents and mobile homes flutter bursts the tensioned silence as all the ravens rip upwards in a flurry of wings and feathers arc and dive all at once. A beautiful inky pirrhouette slides like an oil spill through the sky towards me. Stunned by the beautiful display and fear, paralyzed.
Claws and beaks tear into my flesh and cloth ribbons teeter-totter, sail to the ground among rivulets and runnels of crimson.
I can't feel the ground any longer. Eyes roll back, turn white to face...
-out of the shadows steps - "Me?"
Smiling back.
I look up and see me carried away by a hundred black and eager carrion birds, dissipating slowly into ashes and drifting apart on the breeze.
My only legacy, a painted splash of concrete.

Lost and Found

They found me flayed, 
as they crawled out from under rocks and strewn, brown leaves.
Little people like ants with corkscrew horns for antennae.
I unable to garble any garbage from my trap just lay there frothing. They had found something mythological so they were bound to kill it.
They pulled out weapons innumerable and began blasting and prodding.
I was tagged and wrapped in twine,
then dragged and quartered and placed in brine.
My flesh and most bones were tossed, while some of the larger bones were tossed to the dogs.
Saddened by the quick dismissal of every tether to the world, all things feeling, crumpled and trashed. Because I couldn't speak they dismissed, killed me.

True Love

True Love

I took my coat off and hung it by the door.   

"Sorry, but I won’t need it any more." 

The look of horror on her face, it was all I could see.

Because I knew right there she was horrified by my skeletal scream. 

Her face drawn up in rictus grin of disgust. 

At the cellophane entrails and the spattering of rust. 

All my gears and cogs  out open,  just ticking - twitching - away. 

I stood agape with nothing else I could say.

The caterwaul I could see climbing up her throat like a tree.

All nails out, pointed straight back at me. 

All the stained glass shattered in a murderous spree. 

She came and took my hat and hung it by my coat. 

"Sorry if I startled you; I’m home early from work."

You flew in so quiet and just appeared like a ghost.

Next time announce yourself don’t be a jerk."

Then we started laughing as bald as could be. 

No tattered rags for either or each. 

Just a couple folks in love, living in a cemetery.

Pretty Little Thing

Its eyes incandescently strike me, with each gentle caress of my finger.
In the palm of my hand melted plastic, and rare metal. Entranced in reverie, surrounded by the motley, but deep within it is only you and me and all knowledge in a web you've caught me. Hypnotizing glare frozen in a photograph enhanced for later play back or to share when I fall self-conscious in a spiral. Perhaps some of that motley also stuck in the glowing eyes between their fingers will connect with a façade of thumbs up.

A Little Distant Pain

Blood, stone,     joy bone.

Rocked the boat              walk on water              stay afloat 

bank left      alone left              crash right.    Blood cement.

Splintered bone,          flashing life               strobe light

tears in flight

tears in flight 

strobe light        flashing life      splintered bone, 

blood cement         crash right.        Alone left       bank left

stay afloat               walk on water             rocked the boat

joy bone.     Blood, stone

Night Jaunts

The night floods in like rolling lava,
smothering the last dregs of day light.
My breath hangs in the air like smog adding to the
strangle hold on the city.
A voice like tattered ribbons of a well worn flag flutter by on a breeze as dry and un-moving as the skeletal remains of a bloated and squeezed open graveyard rolling down the hill - 
beckoning for a cigarette light to find a way home.
The dim x lights of the night muses spark to life and die an inch away.
Disembodied voices cajole as more ribbons flutter on a river of sliding sand dunes - seeking, seething, saluting pustule'd nudity,
then dissipate as the lowly gravitate to all they know from a classroom.


 

my mind

The voices crawl across my brain
like spiders on a thread.
Pinching nerves that spread their pain
like prophets of the dead.
They arrive in writhing masses,
their legs upturned and flicking,
trying to impale my flies
like bloody pigs upon the sticking.
The voices shout and whisper
in a cadenced drone of lies
that mingles with the buzzing
of a million writhing flies.
They build their webs to catch them
and devour wholly men,
until they find the last fly buzz,
and devour all again.
Reeling and spinning,
the whole world is oblique.
I can feel it swivel jarringly
right below my feet.
Once the voices start to speak.

Ghosts of eyes

Apparitions hide 

in 

mists of fear

with 

purposes forever still; unclear.

Eerie sounds 

and

peripheral sights in night.

Movement 

in shadows bright.

Raising hair, 

goosebumps 

fright.

The pain and fear 

instilled 

in me.

When I close my eyes

it's

you I see