see your body in all its punctured

pores

fractured and bleeding puss-like yellow liquids

with wind making skin flake off and into the air: dandelions

seeking formation within chaos

melting and flying into oblivion:

leaving without direction without choice without time

in limbo

Feel the limbo.

know the nothingness and the space

as it fills your essence in with all it can:

your sustenance and sacrifice

reach: reach: reach: but never grasp

thin air between your fingers with closed eyes

so much undefinition

don’t take out some damned dictionary

unknown evils harm none but yarnless felines

suffer in limbo but don’t dare grasp: grasp: grasp:

the imagined support shall vanish before your fingertips

throwing you off balance until your fall: fall: fall:

stuck in the freefall in darkness: waiting for an end

coming so soon: so soon: so soon:

but no

still in limbo: in limbo:

The distant triangle is ding-donging:

singing like a star all alone in urban blackness.

Distant: alone in its sound,

but only because it permeates the silence beyond the rest.

It sings with an orchestra, but is heard alone

by those too far away to hear the rest.

Like you: you hear nothing but that solitary sound, a part of nothing you understand.

The theater has a ticket with your name on it.

The milky way of sound awaits: a pond to disappear in.

Chaotic pieces piecing themselves together for beauty’s sake.

Why don’t you walk to it? Run to it? Why aren’t you sprinting at this moment so it

can reach your ears and transform your view of your own stationary toes?

Why do you insist on listening to that lone triangle, ringing out above the rest?

…

Ah, so you have changed your mind? I see your feet shuffling.

You are beginning to inch forward… bringing up the dust around you.

Changing.

As your momentum grows with every step, I see your eyes fill with an eagerness for the music.

That song you rightfully deserve. After all you have endured and know you will endure.

You MUST listen.

Because you need to. So you have something to hold onto.

So you can stop being so very alone.

Without the music, why run at all?

…

You’re stopping. Why are you stopping? Now, why did you do that?

Get off the floor. You fell. Now get up and continue.

Go! Get away from here. Don’t fall over onto the side of the road.

Like a lame horse who cannot ride. Aren’t you that stallion I once knew?

I wouldn’t lie down like that. You know I wouldn’t.

I would get up and keep going. Even if there was no music.

Even if there was nothing, NOTHING, I would still run.

But… I am you, aren’t I? And there I am… on the floor… dying…

And our tears are making puddles within which we might drown.

Ah— I hear the violins! And a piano too. The harp strikes out to pick us up.

Flutes and recorders with Chellos and guitars. All for us, aren’t they?

That great concoction of wave-lengthed communications, inducing such pleasure.

It’s just in our heads, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

It could all stop. Right. Now. With us looking at the bountiful ocean of our tears.

Yet the song lives on. As the carrot we use to keep each other running. Until our time runs out.

And I just can’t help but wonder… will it be enough?

Torn tornadoes within my rib cage

Subdued solitary, the man sleeping alone.

He wakes in fear of whom he may find.

Beside him, comfort and pain he wishes to forego.

A longing and repelling, push and pull, a dance.

Just as she rushes to his fortress, the iron-barred gates

FALL.

The wind knocks her back. He watches from his spiral tower of solitude.

Why do his guards do this? He did not conduct such an order.

If so, only in some drug-induced fit of rage.

Shall history dictate future forevermore?

What wheel can roll which has been chipped?

Once cracked, the crack will fall again, with every rotation and permutation.

Stopping and starting, veering and shifting. A crevice and a curse.

He loathes all he loves before those he loves loath him.

Slowly, softly, the sheets slide between his empty fingers.

No body but his own. For no fault but his own.

“She’s gone,” he said.
Like the flower that few off in the wind that he couldn’t get.
“She’s gone,” he said.

And he knew it, too.
(But he really didn’t).

She ran and he ran and he stopped and thought and
couldn’t decide if to turn or run and grab her and kiss
her into an oblivion equal to death and then it would be all
right but she was gone by that time and it was too late.

Or was she ever really there.

“She’s gone,” he said.
(But it was a lie).

She lingered in that tortured soul, withered and worn.
In love.
“I was in love with you, you know,” he yelled at the mirror.

He stared back blankly in response. She stared back blankly in response.

The hollow silence of defeat.

That blank glare of uncaring sorrow, of ice that hurt like knives that skewered hearts to soon be roasted for the dinners of the harpies.

He tried to cry and stop crying at the same moment.
Something about being a man and being a boy.

And neither at the same time.

Something about being alone and he closed his eyes and there he was.

And he opened them and there he was. His only friends the ghosts of flowers he once knew.

Apple fall. Falling. Into your arms.
Eat. Crunch. Please. Sink in your teeth.
Vampire. Cannibal. Daemon. I want to be your sustenance.
Let me be your sustenance.

Orange unpeeling. Peel. Into your fingernails.
Scratch. Pull. Squeeze. Squirt out my juice.
It oozes from my heart in excess. Drown.
Drink. Sip. From me. Please.

It’s cruel and terrible and I’ll hate you.
But do it. I want to feel your bite. Sink. Pierce.

So I can say “ouch!” but in a sexy way.
I’ll get slapped but it’ll feel alive.

But no I am water. I fall. Falling. Between your fingers.
Pour. Spill. Tip. Cascade. To the floor.
Left to be mopped up by some afterthought of your whim.
I ripen and rot.

Bite. I dare. 

Sink your teeth into this mush of your own creation.
The more you wait the more I brown.

You will bite the air one day.
Crave fruit. Apples and Oranges.

Find piled mulch of the forgotten.
Mold. Green. Sour. Bursting. Overbursting.

You will find me and my fruit far too repulsive.
And we will shun you and spite you and hurt you but never ignore you.

Burst. Explode. Extraordinary. Implode. Expand. Encompass.
Never ignore.

Preferable to what silence and ignorance we were given.

Frugal fruits lie. They will let you burn. With silence.
None. Ripen. Rot.

Too cruel, but so were you.

Not me, but the fruit. Let the fruit ripen and rot,
the fruit will feel no fear to ripen and rot your regret and pity and calls of sorrow.

Better bite this apple before its ripened rotted and looted.
Give this apple a chance to bite back.

Crunch. Crack. Sting. Stick. Tang. Sour. Salivate. Dry. Citric circuits. Overload. Bitter rebuttal.

But you hide behind your wall of loud silence.

Re-kindle.                    

On the edge of possibilities.

    Ah, the rush of standing on the edge!

           The pinnacle of our existence comes sharply into shape.

                           The focus of a wondrous lenses.

                                     In the mysterious understanding of a deep shroud.

                                           A shining happiness through a fog.

                                                Forward and moving and bountiful.

                                                    Moving swiftly, slowly, passionately, back

and forth. A waltz’s step.

            A strange, beautiful, movement.

                        Slow, yet exciting. Frustrating. Exulting.

                                    Freeing. That realization of dual timidity.

                                        That perhaps you may accomplish the impossible.

                                               Some distant, half-forgotten dream, is still alive.

Smoldering embers, re-found.

            A hearth amid a stone-cold fortress.

                      New wood and flame. New warmth.

                                As fire flourishes and hearts sprout

                                        Like a freshly fertilized tree in soft ground.

                                               Let me at this new feeling I’ve seen!

                                                  I shall drown in its splendors if I have the will

                                                      To let go of such silly logic and misgivings.

Courage to leap without a net to catch.

            With that I could take on the world. If I muster that, I shall be free

                   of these deathly shackles I’ve held for so very long!

                       Let me at the love I once sought, perhaps I may find I love it still.

Piano, Oh! My piano.

Pluck my heart strings to and fro,

Swiftly pull me unto your bedroom.

Flourish, my friend, my fiend!

Hold me down and force your love upon me.

Let us find some soulful song, some fulfilling tune,

With which to find a crescendo of passion,

A peak of potent power, sounding of sound and soul!

Tour-de-force, take me by the heart, leave my hands free,

Let me keep them, to stumble across a key or a note,

May I unlock the mystery of harmony and humanity,

Loosen my grip, goodbye to this cruel reality!

Such unhinging! Such escape! Such a wondrous world!

Picture-perfect escapades in another realm,

Where my hands set my heart free

And soulful song fills my eyes

An ecstasy. Oh, an ecstasy!

More sensual than any human flesh could ensue.

A sound, a brush of fingers,

A pound! A push! A pull!

Swift strokes. Silent. Loud.

Piano. Pianissimo. Mouse. Silent. Silence.

Stir. Mezzo piano. Grow. Rumble. Mezzo forte.

Rain. Thunder. Storm. Forte. Grandeous, glorious!

Creshend!

Fortissimo, my dear Romeo! Call to the heavens!

Oh, the glory! Oh, the pain! To grand for words, no speech.

Auditory passion. Incomparable. Increshendable.

Decresend!

The fall. The silence.

The whimper of lingering sound.

A feeble note fighting for existence.

A feeble soul fighting for existence.

The whimper of a lingering voice.

The death. The horror of the end.

When our fingers stop.

Our pounding parts our soulful empathy.

That plucking of heartstrings, that manipulation of our very deoxyribonucleic soul.

Oh, my piano, my dear.

My labor of love, strumpet of sound!

Take me to your garden, let us gently caress each other.

Find our bodies in a mangled mix of sensualisoundization.

Do what you will with my body, my soul.

I am yours, dear piano. Dear subtle notes that spark from my fingers.

My dear black magic! My dear erotic auditory engagement!

Run. Ramble. Hide. Chase. Find. Flounder. Fumble.

Please, listen. Sonata of sound. Consume me. Engulf me.

Forever yours in this terrible turbulent tourment.

Hear me!

Through chaos, through time, through pain and loss, through joy and jubilation!

Hear me! Hear my voice, my very engraved essence spill out from the bowels

Of this wooden heart as it beats with senses beyond excrevation beyond excavation.

Fumble. Falter. Furious. Fast. Found.

Found. I have found you, love.

Piano, Oh! My piano.

My dear secret lover of languid voice,

You shall never leave me.

My forever-companion,

My comfort at birth and at my deathbed,

An unspoken agreement.

So much more powerful than the bond of man.

A love of me and music. A true love.

You speak to me and I listen.

As I torment your tender corpus to produce such sound!

Exclamation! Potent power! Fluidity of feeling!

A velvet taste. Sweet and succulent. Acoustic epiphany.

The everlasting sleep of magnificence awaits,

Yet I tell it to wait a moment more, a lifetime longer,

For here in this darkest dark of daemon-like fears,

I have found a lover like no other. A voice. Oh, a voice!

Of no words, no comprehensible flow of failing letters.

Spirit. Melody. Tonality. Touch. Hear. Taste. See. Smell.

Music. From my fingertips, from my own mind, my own ownership,

yet something so foreign magnificent. A greater master.

I am the strumpet of a genius. My body used as a channel for some magic

I cannot comprehend. Some purpose to beautiful for myself.

Some sound I can never here. Will never hear.

But this little cog I can experience. I can flow. Be flowed through.

Let the sound suck me up, stroke me down, explode eternally and coincide cataclysmically.

I am of no use. I am of no meaning. Molecular carbons coercing and breathing.

Yet the breath I truly breathe comes from somewhere else. Outside of me.

Or perhaps something so deep in the depths of my humanity I do not recognize it as my own.

Piano, Oh! My piano.

You are my catalyst. With you I breathe.

Perhaps, one day, you may teach me to speak.

So I may find a voice of my own and sing.

A tree opened its eyes.

When the change of season rained down in the sun light.

Waiting to reveal all the changes everyone thought might

Reflect upon this good. Reflect upon this wood.

Its murky mysteries and quirky quintessential questions:

Answered that never will be. That no one should.

A tree opened its eyes.

And found it was alone in an unknown wood.

The color of the leaves, once green were different hues.

Of brown and yellow and orange and then soon gone.

Sticky and prickly skeletons of what they once were.

And a tree has no idea where the green has gone.

A tree opened its eyes.

To read the very same story told again.

With all those different words meaning the same thing as before.

On the pages of the grinded-up meat of ancestors forever gone.

Of memories destroyed in new perspective. A changed thinking.

Retrospective. A green to brown to snowy, empty branch.

A tree opened its eyes.

They squinted into a bright light and scurried back.

 A tempests torment that stirs up one’s heart,

The mountainous climb where the peak can’t be seen,

A river’s path, shrouded in fog,

A crossroads in which one cannot see a thing.

Cannot choose consciously.

Must steer with pure instinct.

A sailor’s nightmare.

But then there’s you. This kind of constant.

This advisor to the shape of the winds, the tonality of life’s natural force.

And it comforts me to have you on m crew.

Because you seem to know what you’re doing.

You make the fog a little clearer, a little less lonely.

Something to be known amidst the dreadful unknown.

A compass that stays steady at the poles of the earth.

A papyrus map that can stay dry a thousand times submerged.

When the sea’s rise high and my spirits fall low,

there’s you: the sailor’s advisor, the queen of all companions.

This is a world for the dreamers

Each minute detail formed for our soul purposing

our clay to form monuments to never be forgotten.

Each mountain peak each pebble-strewn stream,

every ocean-side sunset and dew-struck sunrise,

each starry night sky and hue of painted color,

all made for none other than the likes

of me and you. Dreamers lost in the torrents

of a stormy, bleak world.

Or a blank canvas to be dreamt on.

Dream, they say, and you will fall.

Dream, they say, but do not dream all.

Dream, but not so far, for when they’re gone,

the leftover water vapor clogs your lungs and heavy heart.

Dream, I say, to stay abreast.

Dream, I say, dream for all the rest.

Dream, and to such lengths, that when they’re gone,

their ripples last in the pond of the mind, the waves of one’s soul.

Dream, it called, to be free.

Dream, it called, dream all the way to me.

Dream, the whisper screamed, to run to a beach

of golden-touched grains and a sinking single yellow yolk cracked on a sky.

Dream, the world yelled, to live.

Dream, the world yelled, for the sake of the world’s dreams.

Dream, and know you’re right, this world was made to be a palette

for the brushes of dreamers to craft their masterpieces with.

stimulation staggering like deadly knives piled above the world in a leaning tower in free fall too large to ever hit the ground and if it did it would rip through the soil of this damned earth and fall through the other side and then all would be gone and gone and gone and gone and gone but do much could be found that we can never ever ever see

a trees growing out of weeds in an unkempt field so torn and turned over the complications cannot begin to imagined of such tangled roots running along a ragged hill ravaged from sun and wind and rain and can’t feel my body and eyes are glazed over and gone and only a stirring of my soul remains tormented and terrified of such beginnings denial and dichotic so different than the plants I once knew

mountainous mountainous mountainous monumental and morbid slippery and slipping on a silent slope of slushy snow into a bite from a succulent and sensual fruit oh tempt me not foul imaginings there needs be not another worry in weary brains of lovers to fill with woe of a passion pleading repression oh that I must I must repress that I must I must regret and relive with every accidental stroke of brushing and thought and glass-clad eyes seeking me and No. Please, No.

The station floats off ever so softly
As I ride a train away, steam billowing,
Clouding my visions and perceptions,

And I call ‘it’s not goodbye!’ and I know that it’s true
But she knows that it’s not true and it’s a matter of time

Until she finds a new hand to caress like she did mine
In a series of forgotten foundlings, lost and found and lost

And only now as the stormy smoke has cleared
Do I see she’s gone. Gone.

Gone.

And I’m in a big, big, world.
Alone and scared.

Mildly devoid of hope.
But just mildly.

For the smoke has cleared.
I can finally look you in the eyes
And decide to forget the train back home.

Oh, where have you gone?

I knew you once. So great, so grand, so good.

That beauteous smile, that gracious glance,

that glorious beacon of light from the dark.

Oh, where have you gone?

Into the blackness of this bleak world?

Let it not be so. Let it be a lie told by an imposter.

Don’t break my heart again. Don’t leave after you’ve already left.

I couldn’t take that. I wouldn’t take that. I won’t take that.

So don’t tell my your gone. Don’t tell me you’re dead.

Don’t tell me you’ve been born anew and I can’t get you back.

Because I won’t listen and I will search and I will fight for who I once knew.

She can’t be gone. She can’t. I simply won’t take that as an answer.

Buried deep beneath layers of pessimism and defeat, you’re alive.

I can close my eyes and hear you breathing. Your heart thumping.

And your lungs breathing in air and exhaling a tiny squeal. “Help.”

Behind the very bars you crafted yourself, the ones I’ve been beating against,

Trying and trying to set your infallible spirit free,

it’s hard when you claim these bars are now a part of you.

If only you could see the trap you’ve become

maybe you could stand on my side of the metal.

Oh, where have you gone?

Don’t be so lost in your despair, the faith you’ve lost is one I’ve sustained,

and I’ll wait for when you get back, and when you do, I’ll be waiting, here, near, or far,

With these words so silly that aren’t good enough for you. But I’ll keep them all the same,

For when you’ve gone back home.