Theater of Sorrows

Graves in Rows

In the sickroom; This dread abode…
Hateful season, how you mock me
Sooty angels pry into my dreams with caustic, razor fingers
Of which they use to riven the last tatters of hope
Place their decayed eyes in my direction, as gauzy lips of melancholia, stone cold
Are pressed against my forehead
While they trim their hemlock wings, leathery feathers piling up like the brittle stars
That you’ve left inside a thousand green bottles on top of the brick wall in the back yard –
Graves in rows
Taking up too much space in my heart –
Rows so long that they blur into shapes of useless mouths, sinful lips; Like yours
Spitting words of which you’ve casually dissected all meaning –
Sliced away its resplendent, precious luster
Little by little as the toilsome years bit deep
When a mothers wounds were handed down as bitter candy
Love embalmed with cyanide fractures; Eggshell fault lines from preexisting umbilical instability
Goading life to swipe away at your spirit during such thankless decades of drought
A heritage of malnutrition and insanity
Until you found your god in a bottle
Disassembled and parched; You drank him in
Razed the roof until you rattled the dead –
Annoyed; They screeched against the cinnamon sun that rose from booze-soaked veins through your pores
Oozed from your clammy skin…
Bloated pupils drift aimlessly; Jellyfish sans tentacles –
Ricochet in slow motion off of violent irises
Like blobs in lava lamps camped out on top of a seventies television set
As you slump back on the couch, stare at its blank screen
Like it’s a wormhole to Persephones sanctum
A haven where the bones sing you lullabies that empty your head of its torturous pain –
Your affliction, boring through blood and bone in frenetic mastication…
Drop by drop, liquid sex sliding down your throat, until moony delirium
Did you find a gods perspective from your hazy alcove?
This wasting away…
Until you have no care, no concern for precious things
Stepping over the cusp, raging demon; You have left your eyes behind
You have cut your face into my greatest fear
Torn your lips into a snarling ferocity that spits our memories into ashes of tears
My heart, my spirit disintegrates into suicide wounds
The air swirls as Mercy descends, leathered wings curling round her…
There is no place for me in her sooty embrace
I’m not even a shadow in our photographs
I hear you humming in the other room, as if you’re at peace with our final goodbye
I hear you set the bottle down
I used to think that your indifference to my feelings was your wounded child lashing out

Feed me gasoline
Then set me on fire
My pain, my flames, our demise –
The only light in your dead eyes

Glass of water at your lips

Precious Things

Were it not for your departure –
Your subtle, sweet scent which lingers on the voile curtains
Wraps around me like a silky husk…
Like a last, sorry goodbye from the arms of a lover that knows he must abandon all hope –
Crushing loves’ timepiece beneath the heel of his well-worn boot, scattering its ghosts in all directions
Were it not for these precious things –
Hours of dreams, and dreaming
Countless flutters of the heart, murmurs of desires, joyful transcendences
Stitched together on butterfly wings, to take flight with the swiftest ascent
Melded into the armored breastplates of dragonflies, to withstand the frost, and darkness
And the barren temperament that life offers in the palms of its withered, calloused hands…
Then, I would inhale the last of your scent into my wilting lungs
Hold it there until it spun itself into lacy threads that built sticky, scattered webs –
Tethering you to me
And oh how I would give up the ghost without so much as one tender tear
Never to breathe another casual, happy breath again
If it meant that I could follow you into the unknown infinities of beyond
If only one last time, my weary fingers could soothe the burdens from your brow
Plumb the braided knots from your ravaged spine
Touch that mouth, of which I pressed my lips against to share my secrets and fragrant yearnings…
Would that I had the providence in this gypsy heart, to alert me to the depths of sprawling pain
That this love would incur
But no… I would not have taken to the sky, wings carrying me to the moons hidden crevices
So that I could deny love, cage it within rusted, lonely bars…
Must I steal from love all of its rapt glory, due to scars, and tears, and throttled rose bushes? –
Petals in forensic freefall, until thudding against the cold, hard ground…
We were chaos in a sugar bowl
And you, with your goblet eyes full of ruin –
A cimmerian, bleak valentine that spoke to me with words of dark longing
You were simmering shadow obscuring sunlight
Misery seeping, fluid and pulsing, like these inky words running off of the page, smearing my fingertips
And I; I was lovingly lost in your decadent dreariness
Tearing at my hair, clawing; Scraping winter wounds –
Decorating my eyes with dead prayers, betrayed ghosts
And brittle feathers, from the carcasses of crows in the corner boneyard, outside the south window
Your promises weren’t mine
We fell from different disappointments before we found our footing
Oddments burrowing beneath our skin, until our eyes lost their shine
And we forgot to find what we never knew
But, it doesn’t matter
I loved you anyway, and love you even still
Your voice carrying in the swaying feathered stalks that caress the brick walls
“Hush,” I tell myself
Those soft whispers are meant to be mine when I am still
The drumming of my heart turning toward the night sky where you are waiting

These precious things that you have left with me
Keep me grounded and alive though I would gladly depart if you somehow sent word –
Through old, musty pages, drum, visions or bird…
I would attempt to take flight, give up the ghost
But all I have left, in the most primitive form, is to hold the curtains to my nose, and see the buds next to the thorns
I feel your warmth against my spine
And I think that this won’t be our last goodbye
I think that it will wind
Through each season, each numinous, luminous, painterly occasion

Puking Demons

Broken dreams, broken plaster
I have known myself for far too long, thus
To be the executioner is my modality
To judge my offenses is my mechanism –
Cut off my own hand, tear out my own eyes, sew shut my voracious mouth
Is my reckless propensity
My ears bleed from the screaming veins bulging at my temples
Like a disorienting narcosis –
I fall into this Springs winter slumber, its bleak grip dredging foul odors from my withering skin…
I’m not sure that I can give this dying my full attention
When the necrosis of my mind flutters and flaps before my monochromatic eyes
Stealing the thunder of my dying…
Outside, all of these weeping trees with their bony arms slice pieces from the air
I want to slide my tongue up those rough bark pillars, and through each gnarled finger –
Until splinters bite, pierce; The stinging pain abruptly shocking my silent mind into an unsettling metanoia…
Let me walk through fields of bones and blooms
Let me claw through this dingy shell, punch through spongy larva into chrysalis metamorphosis
I seek a respite from this loud, sweltering madness
Where I am swamped with derelict seeds of crushing seasons; A terminal equation of urinated moments
Dire drought leaving weighty graves in a row like a serpentine-shaped spine
And these winged things with boxy heads and mothball eyes, that try to creep and crawl beneath my veil
Laying eggs between my teeth, which fester and drop from my mouth
To fall onto the icy concrete, shatter on the ground like brittle icicles…
Do you know me?
Like the unconscious petting of a cat lulls it into rhythmic purring –
Does the honest truth of my words soothe? Harsh and cold as they may be?
Does their candor excuse these tentacled deeds of mine, which have in the past evoked guttural wails?
Or at the very least, rebuffs?
I am not the porcelain cherub, soft and pale, moonlit dreams shimmering in my limpid eyes
I puke demons
Rip them from their wombs, rend them from my soul, drag them from my shoulders
Teach them how to eat darkness, gnash it with their rusted teeth…
I kiss time goodbye with senseless words, dry, dusty, hopeless eyes, and a heart stitched shut with cyanide sutures
I am no ones breathless hour
I am made of thorns and thistles, wretched leather scars from dreams missing blueprints and seamless mechanics
Oh, what have I done?
Cut off my own hand, torn out my own eyes, sewn shut my voracious mouth
And now there is nothing left to save
No savage pain left to feel, no warm, sticky-sweet, pungent blood to dip my fingers into –
Smear my life onto this dismal, regretful existence
In a destinal attempt to confirm that I am not a ghost in a fractured mirror…
Let me be loverly, tease my own eyes into a shocked, sweet bliss
Fan perspiration in melodic hollows, and candied curves and canyons, into bursts of honeyed succulents…
I can’t explain when, or why my spirit became vindictive
Its pinched composition curdling into a sizeable, shrewish succubus…
It’s too soon to forgive myself
Too dangerous to absolve each strangled flutter, crippled bud on the vine
And cold shoulder leaned into a howling, thermonuclear pulse
Too small to try to make what’s wrong turned into right…
I’ve carved no solace, carved no silence
Just devastation
Weaving, spinning creaking webs inside my mind…
But I know that this house needs cleaning
13,000 locked doors swinging wide, the confined air within exhaling, inhaling
To suck my sage and spark into every shadowed red room, every bleak dark corner, every heavy dead space –
Where wallpaper, peeling in blues and greys –
Its musty strips of ruins of lapses, exaggerations, missed hunting grounds and forlorn sighs
Is torn away by my blistered, burning, but determined fingers
Before it’s too long past that sweet spot, and my time has rotted; Done

Vultures picking at my crying bones