Comatopia

Birds slam into puddles
Wings pouring in arsenals of disease
The stalemate of storms
Says I’m sick with a cure
That looks like belief

Celestial serial killers are too squeamish to kill
But mercy never knew that shadow of ours
Intoxicated under the influence of flames
The bottle sits unopened; it’s death that drops like rain

Pangea is restrung
And Odin’s breath steals us
From our prison’s pores
Sedated in swarms
A market of fleas
Clausterphobes and thieves

Celestial serial killers are too squeamish to kill
But mercy never knew that shadow of ours
Intoxicated under the influence of flames
The bottle sits unopened; it’s death that drops like rain

And I’m eyed by the eyes that I’m eyeing with mine
Am I born?
The ephemeral song of your biblical wrongs
Counts the strays

Celestial serial killers are too squeamish to kill
But mercy never knew that shadow of ours
Intoxicated under the influence of flames
The bottle sits unopened; it’s death that drops like rain

Much too drunk with the thinking
You’re forgetful of blinking at the sun
Now it’s your loss that you’re lost
As you cross hell’s alleys where you left your cross

Sweet monuments mourn what’s
Ensnared in every throat
We do our breathing ‘till it gets too cold
Elude the air that knocks on
These psychotropic doors
We keep on building ‘till it gets too old

A brain washed and fried
It wrinkles and dries
A derelict sage grabs at the brain
And shoves it inside
A heart hacked and thawed
From the horrors it saw
A pretense pretends
There might be an End
To impulsive flaw

The ruins of fallen kingdoms,
They’re waiting to break my fall
Intent upon the instincts,
Content without them all

The hallway ends upon a ledge
The lights go on, cause life goes on-
Begin again

The Ides of Litany

show us how you hobble when your ankles twist and break
when we serenade your carcass, picking clean your ravaged state
now, escape is just a justified just barely just it is
the future is so tense now with the present's last past fit
mid life crisis, kiss the irist
the swallowed pride that binds the eyelids to the ides of litany
with chuckles stripped of their shackles, washed clean of their sins
they were baptized in the fading arms of autumn
and we fell for those leaves as they fell from the trees
while the autumn would fall with a difficult ease
towards a winter's envy wilting away from spring's haphazard disease
all in the span of a wave of a hand
the strangers have met in this season of mists
succumb, rewind,
too lost to find
an idle hearse,
the buried verse
reversed, posses
this dialect
recur, combust
so found its lost
the open ends
revealed again-
against the odds
cry revenant
while all its friends
yell charlatan

The Apothecary

not quite here, not quite there
not quite anywhere ever again
maybe never so definitely
defining what may never be

oh, how the cliff tempts the tired
with the the promise of a solitary step

hold my breath for the second time
converse with clouds as they paint a sky
and taste the rhythm of the landscape's heart
preached in perfect, pitchless art
seeing noises in the fog
these timeless clocks, they rip apart
feeling voices reaching out
in fiction i am scattered now

feeling,
reaching,
breathing,
healing

(no
[time)
(stole]
[me)
(too]
[long)
(gone]
home)



third eye turns blind
first (and last) carved in the palms of their hands

whispers scream, "curtains please!"
encore limps with doubt

right side twilight
last (and first) to book their own spirit's hearse

demons dream of heaven's eve;
birth on the wings of a verse

(2)

When I step outside I
(When? Why?)
Was I?
I?

When I slip inside my
(Would I?)
Mind?

How I try to blindside
(Eye my)
I.

(1)

we call Noah an arcangel
words slurred, worlds blurred
the heart attack, the attic's child
cold consumption
a fit of hope
maybe convulse in stillness
foaming at the whims
arranged in ecstatic"not now"s
and walk too far ahead of what is too far
that its seemingly not far enough
uncertainty knows it's uncertain in its ability to
know

Sevents, Seventeens

intertwine under a highway’s coronary
the tensions of living above ground
step into step two to step through to the two step
swing through divided into sevens, seventeens,
impromptu as the patterns a catamaran draws
on the surfaces of an anorexic stream
Roanoke extends itself-
this is how to disappear completely
to be the blood clot under a freeway’s destitute artery

The Neighborhood.

i’ve tasted the broken back of a concrete laden with the burdens that were never its own, dressed in disillusion, and decorated in the cigarette butts that (may) have numbed that disillusion for a moment-
And like every other, that moment is always spent somewhere far off

Everyone is where they are not.
Limping with reluctance.
Good intentions; their crutch.


they paint their excuses with circumstance
they paint their dreams with reality-
the reality of a darker dream they refuse to accept


AND
every time the late night shows are seized and held hostage by a scorching sun,
or the windowpane of a bus becomes visible against a distant colony of stars and the driver announces your stop
every time a pair of exhausted eyes opens to see a desk and there is a throbbing mark on our forehead from where we had passed out learning the lyrically convoluted language of a chemistry book the night before
well,
we wake into our delusional dream
and speak with neighbors to be POLITE
(there is nothing here)

Meanwhile
The trees observe and they grow. Sometimes, they die.
And the clouds…. The clouds waltz to the whim of a gentle breeze.
Sometimes, they convulse in horror of a hurricane.
They have never been anything outside of themselves.
(there is everything here)

So we dream when we’re awake
Dream of waking into a dream someday
Where waking dreams awake from dreams
Of wakeful worlds and dreaming fiends

Lashings of a Friendly Fiend

oh, the lord loves to paint
but he best save that canvas for your technicolor cries;
your damaged desires for a shell manifest in a mirrorproof vest
where you hide from your best
and conspire to caress a malevolent mess
never born, so forlorn, you conform to the cryptic confusion of you
taunting the tyranny of terrible truths
conjuring injury, with purity you jest
offending your oracle with that terrible mess
in your mind, losing light, craving night's
malevolent name, maiden in her voyage to seduce and to spill
and to save that cursed canvas that will color your cries
stripped to the surface by your tedious trials
and errors and endings and questions caress
the shell that I pierce through your mirrorproof vest
why?
look around
could you honestly sputter the delicate sound of a soul that is found?
no, you breathe in and drown in the lack of the up and the down that only the most vicious void in your veins and your voice would allow
and no chain or charred rope or scarred church or cold dream
could bind you as completely as a total emptiness
a mad, crippled chaos in an infinite cocoon
where eternal damnation and bliss eclipse like the sun and the moon
and a frail forever will shrivel too soon
if the lightning splits the sky of the I and the you

Time Keep

through the looking glass of my innocence
the yin and the yang unwind
kissing the trees on the terrace that tempts them
with porcelain gas masks and wine
the timekeeper; he's counting off time
holding on with the fingers he broke
when he tried to reach for the sky
incense for two pence and a piece of their mind
that’s waiting for its peace of mind