The glowing thoughts swirl on their own volition.
They never ask me for my input.
My opinion would be merely a grinning skull,
some sideshow attraction to that which finds me amusing.
The battle for self commences,
and a universe merges with decay.
I am that entropy, lost in my own desire for more than I have attained.

I sit here, in the dark of night, and I attempt to make myself somehow feel something beyond contempt. My heart is beating, if only to sustain the system that keeps me perceiving.

Inside me, within, where the essence of being resides, at this exact moment, there is nothing. There is a silence more terrifying than any gunshot, more cutting than any knifeblade. Here, where men face themselves, at their core, is the existential ending to all things that have come before.

I sit here and stare at my hands as I type this, thinking about where these fingers have traced muck along a windowshade. I think about the stones they have grappled for, and the windows they have hurled those stones through, with the glass tinkling onto the unforgiving, hard as stone earth beneath. I think about that metaphor and slightly smile, but only until it registers in my brain that I am smiling, and it is then quickly snuffed out of existence.

Just as everything inevitably is.

Nothing is so much more beautiful than something, as I have said in the past many times over. “Nothing” is beautiful, because has no reason to change. It is content in it’s absoluteness. It is finite and yet infinite. It has no mood or opinion on the unchangeability of the universe. It has no need for a personality. It has no zeal to preach to the choir. It simply is what it is, and that is a beautiful, non man-scarred item.

I have learned through the wisdom of sodomy and pain, through the ethereal reality that is daily life, that, in the end, and at the end of each day, there is nothing to look forward to. Nothing remains. Only time remains.

We will all go into the ground, in one fashion or another. We rarely get the glory of choosing how, but, then again, in the end, it doesn’t matter an ounce. The cosmos, for all our pondering, for all our sciences and our demented attempts to grasp the meaning, does not care. An indifferent task master is this infinite universe. We are but passing leaves on a wind in autumn. How poetic.

Who am I? I am a mistake. I was born out of guilt on the part of the mother, and the violence on the part of the father. Who am I? I am that tarnish on the family mantle, the flag that will not burn bright enough. I am the erasure if a family’s claim to purity in form.

What I am to some is what I am not to others. In the end, at the end of the posting of this message, to whoever cares just long enough to read it and forget it’s contents later, I am nothing short of finality.

There is nothing beyond us. Call your God out for tea, ask him to explain his infinity that he apparently set out like clothes for the work day, and ask him: What is the point?

Suffering…

I sit between the silence and the thunder.
I listen for the purpose.
I inhale to catch the feeling that I am, in fact, real.
I wonder at the possible reality that is before me.
I forget my place in the scheme of things.
I lose myself in this chair,
between the now and the not yet.

Tucked backwards inside my own book of self-told tales,
I find peace.
Crammed between these pages,
the essence of man is kindling.
Smell that? I am burning in my own desire for MORE.

Swirling life in spores of dreams
Along a dancing parade of screaming what-might-have-been’s.

It died.

Listing to the side
A merry muse is heard.

It silenced.

Welcome to inevitability.
Her kiss is death.

…or something. Here are some new pieces…

“Man on the Beach”

The wind was quiet,
for it did not want to awaken man’s ambition.
All was saline, along the shore,
where nary a footprint met the sand.

Man woke and kicked out, lashed out, grasped, chewed and screamed.
The gulls left the shore, leaving their footprints in the sand.
Man mimicked this action,
and nothing was ever fresh again.

I finally understand why Dexter on Showtime is so obsessively appealing to me. It is a microcosm of what it means to be alive as a human being. Literally. All of us have that side, and that ability, within ourselves, in our heart of darkness, to be that which we most often disdain. Some of us simply forget to disdain it.

I find that highly amusing.

—————

Anyhoo, on to the post I intended… A poem, of sorts…

The reason is a region I cannot get to.
I will try again anyway, because I am obsessed with belief.
That belief will be my ending.
I choose it not, but am chosen by it.
The listing ship has no captain,
but that won’t stop the waves…

Incomprensible to the naked mind.
Innocence unseen by the naked eye.
Inconsolable and outwardly shaken.

Shaken, and stirred.
Good intentions ripped away.
Silent as the grave is now a choir in chorus to the parody that was my life.

Blood on the floor.
A shutting door.
Find your maze and bulldoze those walls down.
I was the brick.

Innocent is no longer feasible.
Infinity called forth her due favors.
Insignificant becomes you.
Infinity breathes this for you.

Exhale.
Silence responds.

Close the chapter on this one.
Another book contains a larger font.
They will read on without you.

The seashore is a comment from a heckler.
Far away.
It resides in someone else’s sunset view.
I want to embrace it,
to tolerate myself in it’s glow.
That would be nice,
but reality only pisses on that notion.

I miss the seashore.
The spray and her tickles on my cheeks.
Reality doesn’t care.
Why do I?

Because I am insane.

Corrupting the silence,
emotion always does it.
Bathing the quiet,
intent always spurns it.

So much noise.
So many stances.
So much wasted energy.
Fall down the line and forget.

I don’t want to talk.
I don’t want to listen.
I don’t want to be understood.
I don’t want to understand.

Nothing said is everything solved.
Leave me to my rancid devices.
Bricks in the wall will not smash into mud.

It dawned as I was paused.
Dreams were fluid,
breathing caressed my lips,
and yet I was in unaware stasis.

The nothing of what was something
marched in on volition best described as ‘alien’.
Time flowed on through,
unabashed,
undaunted,
a silent, smarmy witness to the dissolution of all things.

A taste akin to ash in the mouth formed then,
the sense of loss given a tickle stick to my palette.
Everything became sundered.
Everything waved goodbye to itself.
Everything became nothing.

That day cannot have an infamy.
It cannot go down in some recorded book of exalted deeds.
There is nothing left to transcribe the passing.
Only time carries it with her,
the failure of man,
the silence of his turbines,
the cooling of his engines,
the silence of a world formerly denuded by our madness.

Silence is not golden,
it is the day everything becomes nothing,
a purity of essence and flow,
where nature giggles as we dissolve into her garden.

The trying always results in a dying.
That dying has a chorus,
yet the choir has gone mute,
A tone-deaf, translucent failure,
wrapping the trappings of a life lost,
up in smoke, in tendrils of what might have been.

It all unravels like a spreading plague,
touching with fingers witching and bereft of compassion.
Time and space take a backseat to the GOD DAMN reality before me,
and I am forced to make a choice.

That choice is in the wind,
battering this fraying fabric that makes up my heart.
This muscle is pumping, but no sound emits from the speakers,
And the harder I attempt to pierce the wall of silence,
The louder that wall beats me back.

Words on a page.
Carrying the weight of a million might-have-beens.
All for nothing.
All for naught.

I am the bitch of circumstance.

Around the clouds,
where the storm sits watching,
a wonderful dream-state is also awaiting.
The winds that guide it come on rails,
invisible, transcendent, the whirring dervish of notions.

Time to sit this morning comes
Alabaster ideals swarm
Chocolate innocence shining
Melting in the sea of thriving

Away from the routine mire
Hours bygone and notions unbinding
Unbidden and unchained to sorrow
I will be happier today, and tomorrow

I have little time to think to myself
A small price paid for assurances and health
A smile is only a dawn away
In this place, where dreams remain

“The Concubine of Suicide”

A transgender,
literary concubine.
The concubine of suicide.

Sweetly laced his face it rests,
upon the symbolism of her vantage-point breasts.
A caress,
his heart will arrest,
and in the final moment, silence will attest,
to the great stage and show,
All he will ever know,
is he was her suitor,
though he sired not her spawn.
____________

“Wanting None”

Beneath the lazy hours
that typify my graceful thinking patterns,
I find myself wanting nothing but the moment.
Wanting none.
No exposed bone.
No untold secrets hissing from open sores.
No intrinsic meaning in the dervish that is city life.

Wanting none.
Hearing a ton of what if’s and maybe_wills,
In a parade of deaf, mute, legless heathens.
______________________

“The Moon’s Request”

Come hither in this quiet time,
fear not the marching men or their sodden rhyme.
Hold my hand and walk with me,
Watch me slip off my blouse into the sea.

Men will sleep as you march in their dreams,
Look to and fro and seek out their mental seams.
You can take a peek with me,
if you so desire.
Let us forget the sun,
His tantrum and His fire.

I ask only that you remain with me,
before I return to sleep.
It is this I ask of you,
A promise you must keep.

For as the dawn comes fast as a wink,
We part ways avoiding the noon-time bleach.

Walking the distant shores of dreaming,
I am undone here,
languishing in the Yearbook of a thousand what-if’s.
The world spins on.

Looking up at the apathetic, cold stars of eternity,
I am unbound within,
relishing the minute purposes to which I am chained.
The world slumbers, still and dreaming.

Wanting for nothing but everything else,
I am conflicted beneath the skin of my face,
relinquishing the medicine man in my belief system.
The world stirs, as a birthing pathogen.

The distance to actualization is ever-wide,
a river that contains the collected tears,
of a billion bio-signs all hell bent on being heard at once.
The world stirs,
as the ice-cube of me melts into silent carbon copy brilliance.

Another turn of the sun and moon.
Days go by,
and nights flash by.
Still alive.
Still squirming in the mire of self.
Poems still screeching to be let loose,
from this cask.

If words carried DNA within their confines,
mine would be a firestorm of life,
in this sea of cosmic silence.
Still needing to spread the material.
Genetic.
Frenetic.
The intent feeds the fire.

I have said it all before,
one-hundred times or more.
Still there is more, in store,
as they snore,
as deities bore,
while nothing, heretofore,
can silence the deluge.

Why must I document each thought,
each tacit demonstration of refusal,
a refusal to quit?

This determined smile,
against the flux of uncertainty that bleeds obsidian.
This determined sword in my hand,
cutting a swath through denial and doubt.
This determined flesh,
Alive.
On fire.
Proclaiming.
Stained in ink and reprimanding all self-doubt.

The ink feeds the intent.
The intent feeds the fire…

When you ask for nothing,
I will hand you everything.
When you give me a little,
I will give back more.
When you throw your hands up,

You’ll find mine, pulling you up.
When you want it all burned to the ground,
I am the fireman.
When you need time alone,
I am the door you knock on when it passes.

What comes and goes,
is not you, and not me.
What wastes away,
Is another set of hearts,
farther away in time and space, than we have ever been.

What is, is you.
What loves, is me.

Poems come from the mouth of poets,
songs and sonnets and raging torrents.
All has been said before,
But none of it meant more than now.

You are the breeze in my campsite.
You are the salt in my seaspray.
You are the colors in my springtime.
You are the belief I aspire to.

“Dark Alive” 

The dark is alive.
It has eyes.
Those eyes see its own claws.
They encircle my neck,
as I sleep, as I dream.
My dreams are the hunger pangs,
of doubt,
of acid rain.
The end comes as I roll over,
and I see my own demise.
Thus is life, turned to ash,
a lost sentiment on the wind,
the last exhalation of a God dethroned by denial.
___________________

“Mime Night”

On wings we soar,
through the fields of forgetting.
We dropped our hopes,
they weighted us down.
The clowns will frown now,
Not verbs, but Nouns,
who have lost their meaning,
in the sentence of our crimes.

The oil on me is the water you left.
Inspired by the soundtrack to our un-recorded film,
Ours is a tale told by the sea to the shorelines,
The shorelines of a million locations.

We faded, my oil staining your foaming waves,
Opposites refract,
And the popular radio songs that defined our era,
Now rest at the bottom of someone’s closet.

Not rebuked.
Not returned.
Not foreseen.
Not redeemed.

We are oil and water.

What is the method
for this madness that surely sweeps me up?
Caught up, coughed up
against the bosom of a world thrice denied?

There are saline waves
washing against my shore
Here and now is what was once never to be
And the swirling of galaxies watches it all in silence

Silence is the new symphony
and in quiet moments I see you reflecting my own light
a longed-for bathing sequence of events
the cavalcade of now, unfurled against the skies.

The cold outside is beckoning.
It seeks me leaving my abode.
But what will remain behind me,
What of my things, those which I have known?
Outside myself,
winter stirs,
and within me a storm of fire is rising.
None of this remains for long,
the eternal inner battle, reprising.

Around the years
cold and silent,
came the sound of battered dreams.

Around the ears
told and pliant,
ran the screaming streams of dissent.

Around the fears
boiling and blistering,
marched the will to die for something.

Failure came on the wings of wish.
Touches laced the angry leanings of kiss.
Breaths were denied those that needed one most.

The cavalcade came and went.

On the wind,
entropy whispers.
In her hands,
stars witness her work.
Tomorrow gone,
these leaves remind me,
how all things pass away…

(from a photo posted on my deviantart page called ‘Wall of Rust’

*sigh*

Being mids is often a full time job. Although I am who I am both online and offline, I rarely express emotions online with anything other than intellectual detachment or wry amusement. That being said, it is rare when I post something emo. I will do that now. Sue me.

People in our lives have a way of remaining, even if they leave it utterly, both in death, or moving on to other realms of living. As I have grown older, I have come to accept the fact that I am forever cursed to be alone, and yet, people that seemingly are long lost to me somehow always find a way back in. It drives me batshit insane, not in the bad sense, but that I cannot ever foresee these things.

I logged in on a Myspace account that I had forgotten about because I recently launched my official music one, as my login information auto entered, and I hit the enter key without even realizing it wasn’t the correct login. From that, came a bombshell.

Someone I used to know and love, someone who, for all intents and purposes, changed my life permanently, had sent me a message on that account, back in April. As my jaw hit the floor, I realized the worst thing that we can do to another person is what I did to this one, leaving things unsaid.

It was a crazy time in my life, where I was uncertain about my future, and even more hung up on my past. I am still uncertain about tomorrows to an extent, but I have grown up quite a bit since back then, and yet, this person still has the ability to waltz right in through my walls of time and circumstance and leave an echo. An echo of what mattered then, and may somehow matter now.

I do not know where she has been all this time, what she has endured, who she has loved and lost or learned or wanted, but I know that my response most likely will catch her off guard. She sent that back in April, and from the tone of it, she did not expect me to respond. I would have done so, as that is my nature, but since I wasn’t around on that contact point, there was no way to assume I would.

Other than the closed door that hit back then, there is no ill will towards this person on my end, and I have no idea what to say, or how to approach it all. This is rare, and difficult for me to quantify into a solid, tangible thing to hold on to. I know how I felt about her back then, but God only knows how people change or stay the same as time passes. I am not longer the man I was then, just as surely she is no longer the woman she was back then. People change, but surprise us with their inability to see it.

Time will tell if responding was wise.

Not to confuse my normal readers, I am not on the verge of doing something rash, and running off into the sunset with “the one who got away”. I am merely at a confused crossroads of yesterday, and this morning, which slammed into my face by total cosmic chance.

Being haunted, all cliche’ aside, is not always an evil. But nor is it always comforting.

I have much to think about today. The mistakes we make either break or make us. I made a terrible one back then, and it has come back to bite me on the ass

I am in the factory of mind…

As I plan to leave in the morning, I have arranged a play list for my ancient Sony Discman. No Ipod this trip, just the good old days. I will go away in my head, and ignore the fleabags that will surround me…

Disc One:

The Birthday Massacre - Goodnight
Cold - When Angels Fly Away
A Perfect Circle - The Hollow
The Birthday Massacre - Falling Down
Motorcycle - As the Rush Comes
The Birthday Masssacre - Promise Me
Stabbing Westward - So Far Away
Mudvayne - Forget To Remember
Daniel Licht - House [Dexter Soundtrack]
Hanz Zimmer & James Newton Howard [batman begins soundtrack]- Vespertillio
Within Temptation - What Have You Done Now?
Deadsy - The Key To Grammercy Park
Daniel Licht - Photos [Dexter Soundtrack]
Daniel Licht - Changed [Dexter Soundtrack]
Ry Cooder - Sanctuary [Last Man Standing Soundtrack]
Smashing Pumpkins - Saturnyne
Deathcab For Cutie - Title & Registration
Dave Mathews Band - Don’t Drink the Water
Chicane - Autumn Tactis [Thrillseeker Mix]
Hum - Stars
Daniel Licht - End Credits [Dexter Soundtrack]

Disc Two:

Smashing Pumpkins - Fuck You [an ode to no one]
Dj Red Skull - Echoes In Eternity [fragtastic mix]
Soundgarden - Pretty Noose
Nightwish - Nemo
Thornley - So Far So Good
Staind - Right Here Waiting
10 Years - Wasteland
No Doubt - Simple Kind of Life
Switchfoot - Meant To Live
The Electric Six - Rock & Roll Evacuation
Marylin Manson - The Last Day On Earth
Lacuna Coil - When A Dead Man Walks
White Zombie - More Human Than Human
Iced Earth - Watching Over Me
Metallica - Turn the Page (croche’ cover)

These poems where in a 5-star notebook covered in roach shit, buried under junk and shit from my old life. Written in 2002-2003. I thought I would breathe life in them anew, and post them here:

“Purpled By the Cause”

Concave existence.
It stains be blue.
Audio chaos surrounds me here;
A cell-phone sanctuary.
I am bruised,
Bruised and
purpled by the cause.

Tattered responses,
Nary a moment remains for introspection.
A song unsung,
With one order coming up.
Once more,
I am bruised
from a societal kick to my nodding head,
purpled by a cause without a rebellion.
________________________________

“Sitting In IHOP, 11:23 A.M.”

One more bite,
attempting to feel something.
Families all around me,
functional or non.
For a moment,
all goes silent.
For this pocket-eon
all dissent is set aside.
Starting to feel once more,
I have no quarrels.
With none do I have emnity,
and my coffee refills from a lass’s hand.

A birthday song is sung;
the table beside me all aglow.
She is sixty-five today,
What photos must she surely own.
I sip from my cup,
then inhale cancer’s sweetest kiss.
Surrounded by humans being,
yet always alone with my mind in my pen.
_____________________________

“Denny’s At 9:13 A.M.”

Cold and wanton marches
with little room for haste.
We’ve no room for predilection,
A redirection we waste.
On the heels of invention,
to a fabled roost we attest,
that there are sprinkles of dissention,
on our laurels, on which we rest.

As I sit and write alone,
I never missed her more than now.
Within my heart of bone,
There stirs the love of ages I choose not to ignore.
She gazes at dreams, at home, behind her lids,  asleep,
and is sheltered from the chaos here.
I keep her close in heart and thought,
and with a wish, can bring her here with me.
_____________________________

“Infinite Moments”

I set out from home,
camera in hand.
Searching for an unfamiliar land.
I drove a short distance,
to seek a brief instance
Whereby the camera would record the world for me,
the one that daily eludes me.

I never regret
a missed photographic opportunity.
For life is a series of infinite moments
that stretch out,
leaving the chance for capture as endless as the expanse above the clouds.

I set out from home.
I return, camera in hand, but alone.
My photographs record my steps.
Those steps become tomorrow’s lessons,
my album of “Been There”…
_____________________________

“Beneath the Silence”

Comments made without logic
As inane as unwanted rain
Always have to break the silences
Like splinters beneath the skin of my eyes

Sometimes I want to scream,
to ignite the moment and watch you,
watch your shocked faces burn.

In my eyes you see commiseration
A desire to abate and to appease you
Yet within this furnace inside my head
Wrath unending is boiling up

Sometimes I want to dissolve you,
to immolate the child within me and watch you,
watch your world flail itself into silence.

Beneath the silence
hidden from you
The rage of ages stirs
A brew most lethal to imbibe.
Drink not this beverage!

It occurs to me
that all of this time and worry
that all of this maybe and possibility
comes to nothing, in the final glance back over my slumped shoulders

It occurs to me
that all of these gained grounds
that all of this portent and symbolism
comes down to the last gasp of desperate need to fulfill some demented demand

Intellectual fart in the wind
with a God denied, dead, on my shins

Riverbed of time
across my saline-stained skin
Marching currents of loss
whispering against spirits, within
Lost
Tossed
Reverberating and scathing
The news is not thus

This was posted under the angry rants category, but it is not really angry. Nor, it seems, does it fit into ‘life’ because this is not an everyday thing with me - an epiphany. So, for those who may complain and say it belongs in some other category, die in a fire. =)

I finally realize my place in things. Everything kinda gets jumbled up, in life, from time to time, and a man can get lost in it all. I am no longer that man. I know where I belong, and I certainly know where I do not.

People are people. I cannot change that, any more than I can make the sun burn brighter on the other side of the Atlantic to cause problems for people I will never meet. People lie, cheat, steal, and abuse their own, because their natures dictate that is what there is for them to get done.

I cannot change man. I can, however, change me. That change is making itself known, to those I know and love, and most of all, to myself. I am becoming what I used to always want, as a person, but was never quite able to grasp onto. I am losing my ability to care, about what really does not matter at all, in the greater scheme, and I am realizing that despite the nagging doubts of people too ignorant of themselves to understand that, this is OKAY, healthy, and will help me to survive whatever may come.

I love. I bleed. I think. I feel. I am just like you all, and yet, and yet…There is a part of me that remains closed off, fortified, adamant. That part of me will no longer be hidden in the dark corners of my will. I will shine it bright, because I am not ashamed of it.

I will endure, and I will do it on my own. Where I belong. Where I always have been.

Slung this together for those who might care. A screen saver with images and the end credits music from the Dexter show. It isn’t anything spectacular, but it is something to look at besides flying toasters and beaches.

Dark Defender Screensaver

“Phoenix of Self”

I died today.
I became ashes in my own mouth,
my tongue teased in the aftertaste of someone who passed away.
I held on for many years,
to aspects of a whole,
cut into thirds and taped to my eyelids,
forever seeing only half of the truth.

Who we are is such a videogame.
We have levels, but the endboss is always us, ourselves.
There are no continues,
and extra lives are a joke among pals.
This, is who we are,
and who we are is a delusion we build,
on battered, blood and cum stained hands.
We are our own Vietnam,
packed in ice as thick as the denial of God.

I died today,
but there will be no funeral.
Services for remembering are a setback to one such as I.
I crawled out of my own metaphorical casket,
and became the one thing they fear most,
and the one thing I needed the most.

I am a creature.
I am a monster.
But I will not lose control.
My weakness burned to ashes,
but the phoenix within arises,
with clear, fire-rimmed eyes,
and I have found what freedom truly means.

That silence would drown out the birth screams of stars.
Tractless void,
an infinitely greased highway of nothing.
Few debris and fewer bodies would mark my passing,
blazing through a cosmic mime-festival.

The space between worlds,
between the verdant green,
the zealous blue,
the passionate reds
It calls home the blackness within my spirit,
the silent scream within my broken heart

There are screaming echoes
a love turned putrid
a stomach cramping in the night
There is  blissful denial
belief it matters at all
songs that praise dead Gods.

The Abyss of Self
a hell within
I am stained in failure
I am stained in our sin
The Abyss, it kisses us
a train-ride into deletion
for a parade without any crowd

Our scars are smiles
that slash across the deadpan face of God
Our scars remind us of the birth screams,
of doubt, and anguish, and white-hot stars
that envelope all we see.
Our scars remind us we are yet alive,
dancing our little dance upon the dimmest of tides.
Precarious is this life,
but our scars are still smiling in spite of it all…

These walls barricade the spirit
Charmed Devils roam free,
in their prison,
my flesh,
the inevitable backwater landscape

I am alone in a room of my own reflections
They have opinions based on mood
but I am still at one with none of them

And a face appears in the clouds
as the smirk reverts into a  snarl
And a God denied raises his rod in malice
for a child that rebuked his finest love

I deny
They die
Thus it goes

The running consensus with them that sulk
shows it’s fucking head
A viper in the eye of God
There will be no silent march upon local shores
We deign to conquer abroad!

Raise those wills of fierce countenance
for the day is ours assuredly
A clear conscience is a force to be expunged
in fire
in something dire,
made all the more real for a mind on fire in Hell

These are the times that try men’s songs
and a verse can enshroud the dead,
better than the purest white linen

Slumber in the reckoning we bring
Doom has come to your walls
Silence shall copulate with your halls
We are The Undoing!

You are the rose in my life
A black one with red tips on each petal,
signifying darkness made light
Crimson shadows on a winter night
in revealing sight of the stars
a chaotic tapestry made flesh
I love the way we mesh
In darkness and light
Our shadows take flight
Dragons on the wing
You, the Queen
I, the King

Coiled about a heart of stone
rests a serpent made of bone
Cold and remorseless gaze
Beast of night
Slumber in the days

Right hand of God
Perdition’s behest
Rendition profound
Sadist’s Request

The darknes swells
in an emotion’s grave
Lost remorse yells
For someone to engrave - it

Left hand of Nowhere
Puppeteer’s that jest
Flesh unbound
The wicked manifest

She trails her finger along the water’s edge,
out,
over the edge of the boat.
Midnight is overhead,
and sleeping fishes lie below.
Her fascination with the bloodless water,
it captivates.

Hers are the fingers I crave,
against my head,
when I feel hollow and dead inside.
Hers is the glance I seek,
when all I see is aflame.

She looks at me, her head tilted,
unasked questions answered in a smile.
Beneath us, and beneath the boat,
secrets swim among the sediments
of our lives.

Hers is the breathing of dreams,
sanguine and chasing the shadows that
dance across my bones.
Hers was the secret song,
upon my heart, made of ash,
turned to a fine clay,
which she will mold.

Frozen in the senses of some sleeping beast
my hands have come to rest atop my refusal
I tell myself these dancing clouds will smile down on my failings
but their rain burns the nerves,
a cold and recalcitrant taskmaster,
one that has no patience for the humanity in me

The wastes are quiet tonight,
where solace is a memory and pain is a song
I hear the thunder in the middle distance,
rumbling his protest against my complacency