Petrified in a Forest

                                                ~ October 13, 2012

A Wedding Poem

A future first conceived of toy wishes,

Where bold fingers grip paper dolls and planes,

With rigid tales of Mr. and Mrs.,

Innocent kisses consummate their games.

Young lust is a meteoric glimmer,

Lost and found between blinks of endless sky.

Memories heal as time becomes dimmer,

And adulthood hatches, ready to fly.

Sedona sunsets brew desert romance,

Then urban streets distill steadfast regard.

Deep love digs roots as soulful thoughts enchant,

Fertile fruit grows in nourished earth once marred. 

So what does it take?

The courage to bend,

But never to break.

Arise then descend,

Cracks without a quake.

Loyalty upends,

What once was heartache.

VENUS TRANSITIONS 7.30.2012

CONTAINMENT

Reborn anew inside a woodland womb,
Burst minds travel through otherworldly walls.
Demolished dreams of perfect destiny and doom, 
Suspend our selfish, melancholy withdrawal.

Corporeal creatures clawing at earthly tombs,
Our immortal passions deafened to the owl's call.
Muscle over marrow, we bleed and breed to consume.
This savage instinct that once taught us to crawl,
Has us caught in sticky, psychedelic cocoons.

While artful strokes in needle and ink enact our laws,
Forever at the mercy of a frigid, severed moon.
Civilian tattoos removed with soldier's salt and gauze,
Like a wolf he licks himself to mend the wound.
Stalking flesh with hungry, white-clenched jaws,
Wild premonitions dreamt inside a purple room. 

Mercury Retrograde 3.12.12

Thoughts Become Things 

(draft reworked from original written in May 2007)

Patterns surround me, 
richness abounding,
a steady static solid.


Beneath the stubborn stolidity,
Balance begets lucidity.


But habits become rituals,
become designs, become addictions,
become excess, excess, excess…


Nothing exceeds like excess.
Moderation supersedes, succeeds, excess.


We exist to obsess,
as the pattern and the solid,
an expanse within detail,
we're perfection made squalid.


I look to the cold, dark midnight,
blue-black, black-blue,
and tiny dots shimmer back,
far between and few.

A crater faced moon-man whispers worldly views,

while the all-or-nothing battle has me beaten, bloody-bruised.

I wonder what else may I entertain to abuse?

We're always going overboard, we give too little too late.
We push the season, or fall short, trying to play it safe.


Where do I draw the line in the sand,
When I lose myself in the story lines 
scrawled on my retched-etched hands?


Butting skulls up against the glassy stratosphere,
where evaporation wastes not wants not a single tear.
Certain as daylight, from one extreme is born another.
How long will I last before this dream is smothered?


What reason for the seasons of cycles that won't shatter?
Toiling and recoiling, this fragmented demented chatter,
Unraveling tethers of torturous pleasures,
Finding comfort in the horror that none of this will matter...


Are my habits becoming addictions,
or are my addictions becoming religions?
Upending unending rhetorical questions,
as communication circles backwards so neatly.


Blinded and bleary but ever so discreetly,
I lead myself down a labyrinthine path,
open wide with dead-end queries:


Either I do or I don't; I will or I won't.


We fear the unquestioned answer,
and so forego the chance to wonder,
Complacently we fall down under,
A spell that casts incurable cancer.


Will I? Can I? Do I? Should I?


Does a yellow brick road lead to gold at the end of a rainbow?
Will I disappear ever happily after into a sinking sunset?
Or shrink away, self-implode, and lose my lightning powered thunder?


The only question is HOW. The only answer is NOW.

GUTTED

12.25.11

GUTTED

It requires a purge 

putting thoughts into words, 

but my impulse invites sensual swallows, 

rather than an explosive upsurge. 

Filled to anxious overflow 

my bloated belly grows hollow, 

weighted by unspoken stones 

it refuses to digest or submerge. 

While women in skyscraper shoes 

babble gossip of celebrity news, 

cracks in caked face paint reveal 

their invisible permanent bruise. 

Everything 

is theirs 

to lose.
And tone deaf

bejeweled ears
ring shallow.

Purple privileged 

imaginations unused, 

insatiable eyes grow bigger. 

Vomitus ascends, 

and it's too late 

to pull the trigger. 

{AFFLICTED ELIXIR}

Autumn marks your counterfeit advance.
Affected, we perfect the rituals of romance, 
your chilled caresses burn my frozen trance.

Fondly our follied chemistry brews,
in the pounding void of a laser lit milieu,
fumbling in darkness, a unity eschewed.

If you listen to me I'll listen to you.

Deeply we drink pinhead gunpowder tea,
tongues steeped in intoxicated expectancy,
swallowing the chemical scent of graffiti.

Two for you and one for me,
through smiles seep translucent teeth, 
brimming full, three shots of GHB.

If I listen to you will you listen to me?

Gills flap like fish, thirsty for the infinite ocean, 
while sound waves breathe our drowning devotion. 
Life is a drunken dream, careening on lovesick potion.

What law keeps my axis spinning on this notion?
We hear without listening, we feel without emotion. 

1...

11.1.11

Loneliest, luckiest number.

The passionate among us smolder then frost, 

in fiery highs and icy lows.

They choose elation with misery

over a sedated limbo. 

It's all or nothing, or nothing at all.

That's the secret formula 

for striking a perfect imbalance. 

But it hasn't happened yet...

Will I ever shed my shadow?

This heavy cloak of solitude?

I choke back bile, black and bitter, 

Dying to wake up in a dream.

Awaiting my secret soulmate stranger,

To cut the line and release me.

Possibility is on my tongue tip,

But I can't recall it's melody.

It soars above me on a helium high,

A red dot disappearing in infinite blue. 

Inflation with no core, elevation with no destiny,

It reaches the edge of the stratosphere,

And bursts into silent oblivion.