I love seeing myself destroyed–
After I've cried for the second or third time in a row
I sit cross-legged in front of a full length mirror.

Two eyelashes, exhausted from their firm rooting, drifted to the soft of my cheek.
My lips jut out, raw as if kissed into submission, shadowing chin below.
The fascination comes from the way age seems to have settled nicely
Between the tectonic planes of my brow, cheeks, nose, and forehead.
Why is this the face I love most?

Perhaps the deep shadows, concealed and brightened by hand before leaving home,
Whisper to me that, although sadness can hollow and stain,
So, too, will joy make one full and fresh.

This face is not a gimmick.
It does not call for pomp or flash– only gentle kindness
And a tender brush of the hand.

This face, in all its forms, will I love
Still when those brush strokes of worry do not iron out by sleep and sunlight alone.
Even when the flush of youth is replaced by old-age's ground frost.
Even when all my life's memories are stored
In folds and pockets, pores and hollows
For everyone to see.
I will love this face.

Arizona

Tread on the comet's tail
And slip on the ice.
No traction to be found in space,
Where salt grain stars flash a firefly song
In a vacuous lawn of pitch.
Pitchfork prongs stab skyward with
Gramophone flowers by needlepoint leaves:
Open bar for bats and bees.
A kick of dust, a mountain tall, looms-
Majestic above the city flats.
Tiles of copper shavings coat the land;
They glisten with mica brightness and mosaic.
This clay pot land, sparse of tree,
Finds ample way to shade and home.

Dionysus

***

Dionysus: Now then, don’t be silly

Your attitude so chilly

Right from the start,

I knew your heart

That you have poisoned--

Scarlet: Your riddles to none pertaining

Have just got me complaining

Now go to bed

And bump your head

Don’t speak until it’s raining

Dionysus: I won’t speak. Your etiquette when you banquet is not for me to judge. Just know this. I govern who dies and who lives. Your guilt is not for you to give.

Scarlet: ‘Tis madness, what you’re doing here,

Wild ecstasy amasking fear

The dancing ones who hence would flee

Do twist and burn within your glee

This wine saturation conflagration

Intoxication of a nation

Community without filtration

‘Tis madness, don’t you see?

Dionysus: And madness, He is me

Scarlet: Society without its bounds

Makes Slaves unto that Bacchic Clown

Dionysus: The hardest heart is first to drown

And most stubborn crown first underground.

So gone you’ll be

And take you she

[points to Miss Peacock]

Lest this end in tragedy

***

Heimat der Reisenden

Wie oft im Sommer habe ich dem grünen Land verlassen?

Ich hörte einmal dass ich könnte etwas besseres haben.

Die Wörter machen mich immerkrank im Kopf und auch im Herz,

Ich wanderte einsam hin und her und fand mich im Herbst.

Die Bäume waren gestern schön und tanzet in dem Wind,

Heute langsam, nur ein Bild von alles die grausam sind.

Ruhe sprach mir stimmeloß und fragt mich wie ich heiß,

Die Name, die war mit mir geboren, wurde hier nur Geheimnis.

Sie fragte nochmal und lud mich ein, ihre Stimme nur die Luft,

Ich lief schnell weg, diese Ruhe eine musikalische Sucht.

Darüber gab es ein unbekanntes Lindenbaum

Menschen die ihn finden könnten waren heute ziemlich kaum.

Darunter, saß ich still und dacht ich auf mein ganze Welt.

Wo war ich jetzt? Wen kannt ich hier in diese breite Feld?

Seit viele Jahren saß ich da wie ein Stamm unter dem Stein,

Das Land vor mich meinte dass ich würde nimmer mehr allein. 

To You

There is poetry in your eyes;

A wild music that cascades like a cliff-bound cataract,

Catching me easily in its surf.

I imagine us, in our silent moments, in watercolour,

Our soft colours blend together,

Bleed together

Swift as rain rushing from road to gutter,

Never static, ever dancing,

The languid morning's star glinting gently off our forms.

Galleries with Van Gogh wallpaper may stand on every continent,

But how can mere painting

Encapsulate what we have?

Turner’s ships don’t sway in the same way

I do in your arms.

The night before, your face was pained in moonlight.

I traced the curved shadows of your profile

With an unsuppressable smile at my willing lips.

You breathed- a soft breeze across my skin:

A comforting chill that reminds me

I am no longer alone.

I think you might be waking.

The orchestra in my breast begins its tremolo.

To think of your kind, dark eyes!

To read the words behind the obsidian glass:

Water under a frozen river.

How in this great world have I been so fortunate as to be his?

But how changed you’ve been

Since disillusion descended and bound

Those most beautiful of gates.

Your mind, now iron and frosted,

Restricts the heart’s aimless stampede.

The wild music, now uniform,

In line with the entrapping wall,

Dulls to desert hues.

And the watercolour fades– blank.

Lines, too, on your arms:

A figure skater’s work.

In time, you may return to me,

But until then I must lay alone.

I will remain until you bid me leave

For, like a solitary wave on the sand,

So must I always return to the comfort of the sea.

The Hour

There comes an hour now and then–
Your thoughts scrape at the inside of your scull:
Rusty, restless.
All skin constricts and binds your body,
Forcing every blemish to scream and claw its way 
To the forefront of your mind
And nothing can be peace.
Like the feeling that springs up in your throat
When your eye finds a malformed beast,
Weary and bloodied from a needless hardship,
So do you react at the mention of your body.
And your mind:
An emptiness where echoes of past happiness
Rattle unconvincingly like the tail of a dying snake. 
Every new person who encounters you in this hour
Sows seeds of unimaginable hate under your skin
With their well-meaning smiles and hollow words.
Loathing in a lather that grinds dryly on your skin,
Rubbing raw the endless layers of your ancient, frail pages.
What a beautiful thing it would be
To yield the self
To safe, still silence.
It is not, however, the depression that concerns
But the fullness and the bulge,
The fatness and the absolute convexity
That is my abhorrent form.
It is repulsive to me. 
I am repulsive to me.

Bristol

Lavender blooms solemnly now, where once it did in celebration.
The gold and the sapphire gleam less and less each day,
Since she lost her love on the edge of the sea. 
They promised that even death could not thwart such a bond,
So how could a mere twenty-five years?

Both knees to the ground where once he laid one,
The fair-haired lad now grays.
A king in a castle empty
Of all those whom he raised.

What joy is left in such a life comprised of spine and stone?
The question rang for eight long years,
Tolling like a mourning bell.
Cast iron tolled the bell again,
Cast far across the sea.
She was called to a home she left behind among great trees and memory.

All was isolation 
On the metropolitan island 
In the midst of drying desert
Where they raised their family. 

But the children,
Whose eyes: rose-rimmed in dark rooms; clear smiling in the light. 
They, themselves, are not alone or unloved; 
The love from their parents solidifies like concrete.

Yet childhood is broken. 
The garden lost its flowers; the hobby-horse, its rock.
In one becoming two, merriment decays,
Until bitter, leather rind
Replaces the sweetness of the fruit.

Six shards of what was wholesome,
Some in East and some in West,
Pine for days gone by.
The father for his love,
The mother for her home,
The children– their family.

The lavender blooms still, tall and beautiful as ever.
Beautiful and meaningless-
Beautiful in memory-
Beautiful as the love they once beheld,
Which shall never bloom again.

Lament for Lost Youth

In times ‘ere gone behind the sun,

The youthful revel has begun

Their sun-struck ringlets, gleaming, fly

And nature do they beautify.

Their voices, shouting, seem to say,

“Let night ne’er upset this day!”

For it is from smiles and browning skin,

Where childish spirit shall begin.

Alas, pale cloud darkens its hue.

The whirling wind which once blew

gently, shakes the leaves off fruitful trees,

Despite the clamour of desperate pleas.

“Please! O Wind! Call us not!

Let not your riots interrupt good thought

Of fleeting joys like gleaming gold.

Let battle’s call not leave us cold!”

The howling wind replied in wrath,

And blew the flowers from their path.

“Your fate is not for you to say!

No brightness shall remain in day.

When hence from here you try to flee,

Around each corner find but me,”

He grabbed them in unhappy hold,

And forced them thence where they were sold

To fire, smoke, and broken glass,

Replacing glades of growing grass.

Around them fields turned bitter charred,

Their joyful youth from them was barred,

For battle called, its cry a rasp,

Which innocents must surely grasp,

Forsaking sun and kinship too,

And all because that fell wind blew.

The darkness borne on rising breeze

Unstrung their limbs and broke their knees.

How young they were, unlined in face:

Temptation to the Earth’s embrace.

Now children lie, their limbs unstrung,

Their bodies passed, their names unsung,

For battle called without a sound,

Inviting child to thirsty ground.

Let arrows fly and shields shake,

While youthful joys like spring ice break.

With promise of tomorrow gone,

The scarlet morn’ replaces dawn.

Unwittingly their bodies fall, 

Because they answered battle’s call.

Fireside

There’s a surprising amount in common with kindling this almost childishly obstinate fire next to me and trying to have a conversation with you. I can poke at the ashes all I want, pining for the heat the flames gave me mere minutes ago, but nothing budges; A Sysphean dilemma. When I become frustrated with the recurring chill, abandoning the idea of giving up once more, I rearrange the coals and wood and grab the lighter. This time, it would work. This time would be different because I’ve thoroughly thought through exactly where it is the fire will spread and what will catch more easily than what. I’m confident now. But the lighter breaks in my hands. I discard that and grab the box of matches. The first two I strike break in half.
Adults are wrong. They say that it’s an inadequate reason for inactivity when their kid responds “Because I don’t want to”, when, in reality, it is the most compelling reason in the world. If something truly, in its very being and essence, does not want to act, it won’t. That’s what I’ve come to understand. I’m not blaming you for the difficulties that continue to occur between us, I’m really not. This is where I’m going to blame the existential. The world forbids us like it forbids the possibility of a nearby conflagration. The last flame, now small as that on a birthday candle, is dwindling. The chapter, only just begun, is ended and the book must be shut.

But why, then, do I read the chapter over? Three words from it here and there, but not actually amounting to anything significant or very telling at all! Yet my eyes scan it over until I feel I’ve gleaned just one bit more from it than I did last time. Such musings are conducted in solitude.

I look to the full bottle of water to my right and visualize gripping the plastic with an unwarranted level of violence and dousing the remaining flickering light until nothing is left but damp coal and an empty sense of accomplishment. Instead I use a few drops to wash my hands of coal dust and turn back to my book. It's saying something about Amsterdam but I'm not focusing. 

Fairytale promises, with a bright, iron clang, march like a pervasive thread of ants in and around my brain, stitching ideas almost medically into the glistening flesh. Maybe it's more like lice, rather than ants, because the insectile eggs of false perception seem to be multiplying quickly and spreading like a fire across stubbornly arid grasslands. 

This is a selfish fire, though, giving no heat and keeping all merry crackling to itself. I hate this fire because it poses in a Vogue issue of truth, with long, toned legs and this season's most sought-after shape. I occasionally catch myself lustfully fantasizing about this fire and its oh-so-easy solutions to the complexities of life. By its reasoning, televisions, Gutenberg's printing press, and instant coffee were all built in the same day Rome was. Time becomes like the bellows of a frantically moving accordion and it kills the mind to even attempt to keep up with its machinations.

What more can we expect from a day's reverie? To begin with wondering why the room is so cold and to end with how fiction romanticizes life to the point of farce within the space of an hour is to be expected of an active, paranoid mind like mine. I think I'll plug in the electric heater.