Poetry

The tent sags,

the weight of my stare.

Caving in around us.

Red laughter dribbles from your lips.

You pour sharp liquor 

down each other’s throats.

Feeding on one another.

When the bottle comes ‘round to me, a fog of eager thumprints, lipstick bleeding at the rim.

I shake my—

Through stained teeth you reason: 

warm. body. finish. 

Your words dissolve to smoke.

All I can catch, 

“an acquired taste.”

I leave. Quietly, out the back.

Eyes looking nowhere.

No trail further than the fingertips, 

outstretched before me.

My feet painted—battle scars from petty trenches.

Grieving limbs naked, against the frigid, friendless cold.

I collapse on fresh soil.

A grave I dig,

unmarked,

but so badly wanting a Name.

One hand escapes, to grasp specks of

dirt, shovelled by the other. 

In the distance,

an open fire. Mouths part, 

breathing. 

Sleeping.

But from here they look like wolves.

The moon, sharpening their fangs, 

stained—unmistakably crimson.

When morning comes, you pluck from last night’s glass.

Little spears to torment me with. Drenched in soured pity.

I’ve come to learn: olive branches, from a distance, are simply saline bullets.

Sterilizing exit wounds.

Gone, before I think,

to throw them back.

I. In the spot beneath your rib, there lies an ache.

Hunger; magnified by the heat of morning's sun.

Once, you were satisfied by the simple pleasures Earth concocted.

Now, you grieve for what it cannot give.

Still the seasons change.

 Still Earth will spin its circles ‘round you (though you don't notice), in ecstasy of rust, and bruise —skies of pink and other unimaginable hues.

You are blind to color, but the Earth is not blind to you.

All of it,

forgotten by the afternoon.

II. I blame Michaelangelo. 

He brought the heavens (and all that color) to our feet.

Painting us a mirage, an illusion —that the sky is lower than it is.

That stars, real stars —of invariable defeat, are indeed within our reach.

At night the doors are bolted. 

Candles blown out. 

The last of its visitors dissipating into the fog of dusk.

A lone bird lingers in the pews, clawing out from its nest of straw.

He stretches his wings, and begins to circle, in the dark, around its walls. The only time he's allowed.

From here, the pale glow of the moon, floods through stained glass and scatters across the stars of his chapel.

His wings follow the gospel of his eyes. Upwards.

It’s still there, the grievous dent in his beak.

An eternity spent searching for Heaven, and finding only ceilings.

III. We are cruel to let Dreams perforate. Through thick skin, swimming freely through open veins.

Hemoglobin, that clutches at the oxygen behind every thought. 

Until logic frays, —grasping a branch of nonsense as we fall from the ignorant cliff. 

How the radio frequencies of the mind seemed to fade, the paralysis of truth replaced by downward flight.

Then—

A parachute, a slow and shameful descent back to the living.

Another one, saved. 

As your feet kiss the ground, you feel the soft wisp of Dreaming left behind; the faint sting of paradise at the base of your skull.

Now oxygen is tasteless. Torturously bland. Banal like most evils, and in circulation all the same.

They will tell you:

A dream is just a word. Like any word, —imagination, and nothing more.

IV. In the days that follow you will come to realize, you shall never breathe the same.

Never again will you be as free as you were, falling from the mountaintop —piercing the veil and returning Heaven's reject.

The rest of us remain below, a chaotic frenzy of condolences, wisdom, and relief that you have landed on your feet.

But no one shall applaud your fall. 

We are bird-watchers,

Wing-clippers,

Farmers of a waste unique to our kind. 

We are the starving race that one day won’t survive.