The haunted are strangers to death
They have no familiarity with the last rise and fall, how it gasps and rattles
Catching in the middle of the breasts, deep, strong, feral –
As if to name its course, in defiance, and howl its final earthly indication
Death harbors no animosity nor is it complex
But there was no ordinary in your simple death
Cold, metal rails, tethered to warrior wrists, strange eyes in a corner, privy to your last truth
Fate has fallen into disrepair and karma into ill repute
But even as the demons churn, you remain a sacred vessel
Every scar an exquisite poem or novel, minus words, of your measure –
Your catastrophes, drenched in blood and sorrow, washed with rain…
And your pinnacles, passion and joy – mountains of fire, lit goliaths that tower over the sun, keep its secrets
Now, that last push from inside out, against your bony armature, and breath gives up its ghost
Your body lurches up, then back, cooling, fracturing – hisses out what its held in…
Sage eyes still gaze through closed lids, your spirit wild as it leaps from those sturdy, fierce bones –
To circle the room, long, dark hair whipping at the air as you climb the walls on muscled haunches
Hand to foot… hand to foot… round and round the dismal room
In a spectacular ascension to the further
And I stand in the doorway, your image – that no one else does witness – echoing in my eyes
Smashes my sanity into fragments, jagged pieces of me that slide down myself onto the cold, beige floor
I wait for intruders – hunch-backed, putrid-breathed demons with diaphanous wings to entomb me –
Scoop me up and shroud me in those wings, as if I’m wearing a second skin – to take me away from myself
In this moment I would resist, if my insanity would keep you here
But while I imbibe you, in a thousand ways from these thousand pieces of myself –
I see you shift into golden, spun strands… floating, to hover on the ceiling –
Disturbingly, unforgettably beautiful. Disquieting every truth, every reason, and then
Swaying as if dancing, spun strands of infinities of eternities, delicate, graceful, heartbreaking…
Arching and twisting, molten threads intricately weaving
I peer at your glorious rapture, entranced, lost in the moving, rooted revelation
This shattering of nowhere that is everywhere
More divine than any miracle made sweet and pure by angels breath
Enthralled with this insanity; I feast on its sweet ripeness, gorging until satiated…
Juices stain my lips, and run down my mouth
Drunk on this clumsy feast –
The river of pain rushing toward me is damned, diverted into channels burrowed by those who have gone before
If only for a moment, the demons scatter and I sink into a spongy catacomb of oblivion
Then time claws at my mind, ripping it open, its insides falling out – dripping down my throat, choking me
The plump moon, ripe with frenetic lunacy, fondles my eyes, blisters my feet as I run barefoot into the madness –
Madness is a sweet distraction, like a sadistic lover in my pretty bed
Every small, exquisite torture a way to quiet myself…
I am the demented, the wicked, the delighted damned, the depravity within, without regret…
These are not vices. These are sacred madness – my essential being
Your dark is my beautiful
I want to lurk in this alley, slink into the deep recesses that crave my fiercest pain, my ugliest truths –
Invoke the healing of my battered soul
As time moves on, it devours everything eventually, without conscience, rationality, scientific generosity
Your human form has long been gone and I wonder where you dwell around me now
Are you the breath of the trees? The murmurs of the rivers? The roughness of the stones or the softness of the grass? The crows watch me from the tops of the evergreens that you never got to see
Do they call your name when they see my tears?
Do they call my name when they see your meaning?
I exist in earthly form with gratitude for all of the beauty and the sorrow
I celebrate your existence, then and now, until I join you and we exist nowhere and everywhere
Theater of Sorrows 