Love

Gaze at anything too long and you are bound to know its flaws. Burnished eyes grow dull while love turns cool.

Gone are the small gestures you used to show of yourself, the kindness you could give to someone else.

Handwritten notes and breakfast in bed; orchids in a vase on the table even though I know they’ll just end up dead.

We become familiar, complacent in a clocktower of scripts. Can’t see beyond the veil we built for another’s bliss.

Then scorn my love, burn the sheets, hang us out to dry. Rip through all the pretense, it’s then we surely find.

Ourselves again beneath the ash, we fall in love beneath those masks, we thought we made to hide the cracks, beat for beat, stronger than the past.

Bars & Gardens

I care too much about these earthlings to simply observe us in our chaos and perplexities- to calmly immerse myself in mundanities, day in, seconds out, turning myself round and round to see.

Bourbon sipped, dim & dank pub, scuffed & burnished wood bar, soft enough to imprint with a fingernail, slightly whiskey-sticky sweet. Thoughtless and abrasive remarks from undistinguished men – words never land- wax off my shell-slick exterior, raincoat resolve, dripped and shaken off, a wretched hound. Insides chilly enough without the deluge of cheap banter, cheaper than rail, alongside popsicle stick punchlines.

Humanity weeps – would that I could spend the hours counting newborn leaves amongst my garden – life brought forth as the sky opened and wept for them to come, overflowing and unburdening its intent into the flowers and foliage.

Helios- breathe life into complexity, weeks of toil, suspense, photosynthesis embattled beneath continental eons – 4 billion to be close, years of this planet, boiled down into one medium-sized sweet banana pepper sown by mine own hand.

Hoard words, knowledge like sprigs on a dandelion, awaiting a kiss – exhale – blow it all away, uproot me from my quaint garden and offer my thoughts as seeds unto the wind.

Stark rebuff to smart suits, heads down, dialed tones, eyes hollow or calculating, ever against the odds.

Electrons, neurons, data and bright, bright blinding ambition, screen lights, too bright in uncalloused hands.

Walking sleepers, mouth breathers, I too an unbeliever. Mere diversions from the reaper.

Creature

Heavy as a glacier eroding the world beneath me, crushing the earth, dissipating my whole self across the entire land until I fill the spaces torn open in my wake.

Haunted creature – drifting over metropolis cobble stone streets, a wraith observing those of matter (who matters?) Not solid, yet steady, floating through dusk down low-lit alleys, untouched by gravity or mortal coils.

Streetlamps map roads most traveled, while the trolley brings folk round and round again to try their hands at fate, love, endless dreaming and playing blind odds at every intersection hoping for a flush or even 2 pair to start.

Dare I wake? That I might corporealize and try my hand as well?

Membrane

The border between two spaces, like a scar, but serrated – not surgical – messy and jaggedly healed by rough hewn stitches so that it might grow together again. “Closed” yet never again the same smooth canvas as it was.

Where you were before – who you were before – exists as Atlas roads and healed wounds – threaded through with DNA and white lines that bridge the iterations of our skin, our metamorphosis.

Borders – compartmentalizing ideas like cell walls, phase through the membrane, barriers dismantled in the wake of your hand in mine.

…

The back of your hand, warm almond-parchment hue, lined with blue veins and lifelines penned with stories; creases delicately placed atop five stalagmite knuckles, worn not wary, calloused yet not rough, brush against my cheek like down feathers or fired clay.

Most intimate gestures, skin to skin, symptoms of the flesh and syndromes of love and science perpetuating life and the magic and meaning of us all.

The physical, epidermis touched and visceral; the chemical, pheromones commanding and matter transmogrified at a molecular level; the spiritual, transcending our lack of understanding anyways.

Unfathomable as a quasar; celestial object pulsating with black holes in the evolution of a galaxy, powerful and solemn as vapor gathering in the clouds before a torrential storm.

A catalyst – your hand in mine. Was I ever really matter in any form before I mattered to yours?

Melt my reserve, freeze my doubt, evaporate my fear, tear down these walls, I’ll lean into you.

Fuck Covid

Spiderweb, tap. Spiderwebzzz, tap tap tap

Shatter. Time bender. Did we surrender?

Delusional dreaming, two years of screaming, scrubbing surfaces and senses

So defenseless. Like what the fuck

Death knocks once, death knocks twice

Sun sets on the world again and again with no respite

Mask up. Boots on the ground. Mask up! Boots on the ground!

Deathstroke moves through the crowds

6 degrees of separation – life adjacent

Blue dots on screens, green signs over streets

We’re all here together

Somehow, someway, we all bleed

Light Enough

I’ve succumbed to a fortress of my own design.

Thousands upon thousands of bricks, mortared with fear, each and every named for a denial, an untruth.

I don’t feel myself here anymore, yet my boots leave tread in the dirt – kick a plated-toe against the immeasurable wall as if it might falter.

And if it should crack will it shiver like a revelation?

Gray as despair wrapped, cloaked, enveloped in desolation. Zombie flesh, apathy apparent.

Light through a pinhole, piercing the nothingness, not black but grey, yet still a crack, a glimmer of light, light enough.