Poetry about Loss – Page 8 – Theater of Sorrows

We Called Him Michael

We faced it in chorus, but absorbed it with eyes, pores, bones, spirits differently
9 paths of devastation, plowing a 10 year toxic wasteland, carving 13 canyons of separation
Necrotic residue from louche lawyers and corrupt bloodlines
That steel green room, with its antiseptic fringe, bland beige floors, tubes and currents, cold metal rails
And walls that screamed in silence…
A brutal, beautiful 1:45am last call
Lucid corner hawk eyes working overtime, badge 1325 stoically, tacitly silent
Sink into the wall, slide around the crime scene like a ghost, edit offenses, clock out –
Comatose manacle adding insult to injury, where are the crows with that shiny key?
Empty facts from incompetent voyeurs collecting butterfly samples; Ripping off delicate wings –
Desecrating history, writing its tragedy with an unsterilized pen spewing bacteria ink
Which could not be excised with smudging lips or two pair of zen eyes…
Those last renegade bones slicing through the thick membrane of death air –
Gestures bringing life to a conclusion; A modulation of disbelief and disappointment, rise and fall, rise and fall…
How low can you go… (How odd the thoughts you think)
The astringent, last measure of a chest expelling its final breath, like an acupunctured balloon
Do not go there, into the myth of; It will make you stronger –
Those whom suffer lifes brutal hypocrisies do not need conceited, reductive sentiments
Time has pumiced, erased, sliced, smoothed me into exactly what my choices revealed; Decided
And I am not your deterrence, so go find your own plagues, uncover your own self, dance with your own demons…
Here, in this vortex of incarceration, of acrimonious disintegration –
I will not let these acid riddled pages scar my mind, nor blunt my pen
I will not give one second of my eternal child to the vile butchers of my reflection
I will imagine, remember, put form to pieces, and keep you safe with me –
Know those eyes through every door, dream, and nightmare that I’m allowed…
Defining all space, time and matter, your presence was an orphic cathedral on top of fire mountain
Yet love… ah love –
A sophistical valentine stuffed into an elementary school, pink, haphazardly stapled construction-paper envelope –
An article of faith clutched in ecstatic hands –
Isn’t always enough…
It can’t save the light of the festering moon, nor storm the gates of fate
Can’t mutate the evil that churns behind empty eyes, nor guarantee spun sugar and unadulterated bliss
Can’t bind your fingers to mine, nor keep a grown adult from becoming a little child –
As the last measure of all you were is released, fingers slip though fingers
And spirit steps into our ambiguity, and steps into its omniscient divinity
This moment, path, this departure is its own beginning, despite being my ending
Which will then become a beginning; Tucked inside, over and over, smaller and smaller like a Russian nesting doll (Ah, those remarkable thoughts) –
To be held with acceptance and reverence, to witness and honor with love and direction, then
The violence must be tended (Come now, stop pandering to fairytales; these are visions that will be, not that may be)
With blossoming eyes, a soft heart, a childs’ spirit –
A calling to undress our fallacies, frailties, lunacies, clichés and platitudes
Our inconsistencies and absolutes! Do not let these feed you (Mirror, show me my beloved, show me my truth)
Time, fantasy, reality, love, hate; These are not our enemy –
We are
Your shadow kissed the eerie hallway, scurried down its scrapbook walls and I followed
Like I was chasing a hummingbird into a hurricane
While she stayed behind for a love letter kiss farewell
Your cooling –
Her meditative night sky, last goodbye, an insistence toward distance –
Lantern stars softly illuminating drifting snowflakes that covered the last February footsteps…
I chased your shadow until it turned into shimmery strands permeating; Seed, stone, fur, skin –
Energy assimilating
Your name rested on my lips, my snowy footprints shaky, my eyes, lips, and the smoke blue
That I exhaled in the parking lot, as I stared into my numbness
The stars spelled your notoriety and amused the moon
Wind howled like a wolf, its caramel-eyed planchettes waiting for questions –
So real that I looked for tracks across the concrete; City was your nature
The rain came pouring down, pounding like a 48 foot tall hammering man, and I knew then
That the Emerald City sky was saying goodbye
Life bites with savage abandon, chews away what once was; Turns familiarity backwards –
With a simple gesture like opening a drawer and reaching inside…
Secrets come undone
Desert sky, tequila-etched fingerprints smearing inky worm shadows on a one page manuscript…
Shadows that blur and obscure what you thought that you once were
Edits, now my duty, because you’ve always been notoriously late, including to your own funeral –
Stuck on Snoqualmie in a four hour blizzard… hey hey, my my…
Some things are to be expected, and then you find that one page manuscript
Its words wilt petals on the funeral flowers that flood this sunless house of heartache artifacts
You exhale your desolate forlornness into the dusty air of this melancholy museum
As words run backward and inside out; Lies in truth, and truth in lies… (Come hither madness, cut out my eyes!)
One page written in actuality, becoming unwritten in reality –
Pen name missing an author
No one knew he was a nom de plume until the 13th hour
A pseudonym

Including him

Something a bit different III

Loves Ballet (2002)

At Prides insistence
I whispered –
In the distance
You’ll find yourself returning
And bit my lip until it bled to halt tears that were burning
Gauzy love was blowing in the air
While children ran round a fish-shaped fountain
And up red mossy stairs…
And through my skirt the coldness of the wall
Was nothing like the sorrow of the flight of love, now stalled
As if they sensed this tete-a-tete was of regret
The leaves blew from the trees
Floating down and swirling round it seemed in ecstasy
And I
I longed to touch your face
My soul
Reeled from neglect and begged for one more taste
But while your eyes were lit lamps of concern
The flames I used to see for me were now a fire that barely burned
And at guilts insistence
You said, in the distance
You might find the fog was clearing…
But that you’d spurned Cupids pomp –
Yet it seemed your eyes were tearing…
And the heaviness within my heart lurched against my chest
But I remembered vividly you said you thought it best
And I could try a harlots tricks, but stubborn as you were
Painted lips and flirty eyes to you’d just be obscure…
I turned my face against an ill cold wind
I stood and one last look at you about did me in
But love is not, my love, always lovely
And sometimes the truth does truly set you free
It might take time but I knew I’d find some tranquility
And why should I beg anyone to stay who wished to leave?
So then, a smile and one last look
In deep, dark liquid eyes
Funny how we used to share our bodies every night…
And now it seemed the frozen ground held an imaginary line –
I dared not pass or even smudge
As I said goodbye…
The children were still playing round the fountain as I walked away
They snatched a plump orange goldfish but it made a grand escape
I turned around and you were gone, and I wondered if you felt the same –
Or if, like me, you were sad to see
The death of loves ballet

More Blood than Violence

This bitter moment burns
A harsh rising bile, a vicious internal clawing…
To taste love; The sweetest saturation
Carving blue down my heart as it reveals itself to be a ghost
Mourning carried on the brittle air
Through bereft valleys of forgotten bones
A haunting reverie crushing time with its spindly fingers
Searing flesh with its spitting love, sheared of its legitimacy –
Tossed into a fire bath –
Charred into dust
To scatter across miles, spinning into a deluge of cement tears
That eventually rust on the tongues of the damned
In their moment of reckoning –
When their toothless, barbed-wire, open moth-filled mouths
Shriek foul throaty epitaphs, coffin memoirs ripe with bitter juices
Eyes sewn shut in exile, sulking serpent witch pouts
And you will remember; I will as well
But we are prophets of poverty; There will be no further stories
Of those miles in the rear view, 2am contemplations
Wide eyes, love letters, coffee kisses, tattoos
Bed sheets tangled, along with long hair
Darkness entwined with snow everywhere
Madness and cages, cigarettes and rages
Sorrow and shadow spilling onto written pages
While the crisp winter air burned our lungs and our hopes
Until we came unbound in a room full of ropes
Until all that we had were glances and silence –
Slicing through our hearts leaving more blood than violence
To spill from that wine glass you carefully sipped
While my mind was reminded of the taste of your lips
And how they used to travel all over my skin
And melt all my efforts at distance again
So that clothes fell away as you stayed your course
And again reminded me that I was yours
Since long before times brittle shattered illusions
Before poetic rhyme etched on firefly wings
Before there was conscious and unconscious flame
Before there was anything; You spoke my name –
Through threaded seasons of lilac-webbed epochs
You came for me, to protect what was yours
Your wild lions mane and nocturnal warrior eyes –
Potent medicine in the glow of the goassamer mist
Thick and sweet, like dark cherry wine
Your lips an irresistible chloroform kiss
Ah, but somehow we wavered and ice and the cold
Came out of the shadows this winter… took hold
To creep and dismantle, then splinter and burn
As we crashed into each other to damage and churn
In delusions of passion, we stabbed with dull knives –
Tried to glue all our wounds but just bled in reverse
While the wine grew moldy and acrid like stained smoke –
Filling our mouths with ripples of the perverse
Breeding slime beneath our skin that was horrid
We reached for each other but the drowning was torrid
To ravage our hearts… To tarnish our souls…
Once the writhing was done we had nowhere to go
And so this bitter moment
Loves eyeless ghost
A mordicant, corrosive valentine picking at loves withered bones
Blood red white wine to choke down as it turns to ashes
In our room where the bedposts are tied with worn sashes
To eventually rust, to eventually fade –
To eventually, poetically disintegrate
Until not the smallest trace, even if sublime
Is left of two people who loved before time
Just a diseased cemetery dripping with sour
Where angels sutured to demons are being devoured
And fanciful inscriptions written in blood –
There’s no fate, no forever, no magical cure
No “I’m sorry,” or “Please stay,” as it ends in a blur

Just the sorrowful truth –

Love doesn’t always endure

Backward glances to try and hold time
Traces of love in torn poetic pages
Coffee-stained teardrops romancing our words
What’s done is done, tender scars remain ageless
Anguish and regret spilled out in silence
Slicing through our hearts leaving more blood than violence
Wounds bled in the deception of silence
Slicing through our hearts leaving
More. Blood. Than. Violence.
Love lost in the depths of silence…
Slicing through our hearts
Leaving

More blood than violence