tried forsaking you,
sought out a foreign tongue
as your executioner.

I cannot forgive myself,
circling amongst the shelves and
stacks -
lone eagle of regret -
one blunt wing; one limp rudder
of a stunned remembrance.

You took my eyes to
the calamities, calling them the sun.
I stared until my retinas were scorched
and my lungs were bursting
with your intense air.

There was
wonder climbing through
your sadness; there was a stern peak
of sorrow mounted
over your happiness.
Where you were cut,
I bled.

I become the inscribed,
thin slice of man,
wedged between your nib
and the world.

hursday. Soft light. The motherlode.
Sheets of absurdity rain down in
clumsy torrents -
silence bends each rule
of acoustics.
Hands are too soft
to pick it up.
All this sharp grief.
All this grief that spins
a virile web through
the doorways; the hearts;
beneath foundations -
a pounding tapestry;
a garotte for the
unctuous air.

This silence isn’t.
Frozen polyphony,
idling for the multilayered thaw
of another grey day,
washed in tomorrow’s same grey tub.
color-drained, bleached of meaning:
it’s not silence -
this hibernating sound -
an ear to a wall declares
there is always something
gasping,
some small sound given
to something that should
be unheard of.

Silence.
The last bankrupt vein
has been fed; the last girl,
beaten;
the last vile name
sleeps in a violent breath.
4am and it peals
from the carpets
and the bedsprings,
and the spot outside the door where
the man, machete depleted,
lay bleeding. Everything screams -
quietly.

The line’s end.
Too numb
to be terrified.

he schizophrenic is
pregnant.
Her belly is full
of onions, and zombies,
and wild laughter.
Soon it will move,
and dark ideas will
scuttle on insect legs
through her mind,
scratch like small beasts
in the corners, incessantly;
grow larger;
howl for attention.

She’s up there talking now,
to God, and Beethoven,
and the thrift-store
ottoman -
asking who the father is;
after Einstein’s health;
why she hunts for angels
in the dumpster.

In the dark, two floors
down, her questions hit
with blunt force trauma.
I, too, have questions
for Him, but hold
my ghetto back.
Upstairs, the answers
stringtogether,
mingle,
make imperfect
sense to her and her
paper daisies.