Poem #1
Pull your Pale Flag
Wide letters.
We were holding on,
while recognizing.
Those shapes. These marks.
They have stuck like glue
to these gray haunts
in the washing blue.
Worded. Remembered.
Burning ships that tag along.
Fated nooses
that hold up bottled necks.
Stored messages for the sea.
Stored letters that go unseen.
Who shall hear our screams?
Who shall worship our stars,
put out near firelight
where we ignite another rose?
Lost ship in a storm, motioning on.
Burns on, trickling our ashes close.
Rediscovered scenery
on a page no one, but us,
remembered.
We pause, once more,
to glance into empty eyes.
Cold glares consumed in flares.
We read one more letter,
before shedding our sadness
overboard.
Another message
scrawled into a pale flag.
That same ship,
pulling its pale flag
same as a blank page.
Who had realized?
We had relived.
We are revived,
in memories that survive.
Poem #2
Tired Devotion
I’ll hold.
Hold your head close.
Under these waves,
where stars burn down.
All those symptoms.
Synonymous.
With the shot that occurs.
In the dark. In the dark.
Under our hearts,
where waters have come down.
Crashing in the dark.
Crashing against us,
devoted while apart.
We have held.
Our oceans are never one.
With sands that fill around,
hourglasses and empty sound.
Time is a grain in,
with a speck of salt
caught in our eyes.
Free to reign.
Free, within pain.
Our closeness is a timelapse,
rewinding our growing sceneries.
All those hopes come clashing.
Our waves are crashing.
Fading among stars.
Fading, when oceans apart.
Parted. Part us.
For a single walk.
For a lonely talk.
To anchors, we are steady.
To oars, we are rowing
with aching arms.
An embrace. An escape.
Leaving our hopes
smooth as ripples,
communicating
with every vessel.
Each vein that translates
our transparency.
From oceans to murk.
From murk
to clear confessions.
Poem #3
If I had seen your Eyes
If I had seen what you collected,
like dust in a starlit soul,
I might have diluted what rage I find
to subsist me, to resist you.
I might have clung to more than curtains,
to see lakes that shine that moon
above where our hearts release gloom.
I might have seen those shapes,
those puddles, holding your tears
unwilling to let go.
If I stopped holding onto shadows,
if I withdrew from where pain gets left,
I might have seen your eyes
leaving me trails.
Your skin fades like smoke
to blind me back into wrath.
Your heart has become a razor
to draw red blood that tempers me
to realize what I’ve lost.
An anger that strikes fires
not for warmth, but for cold.
For those branches of burning forests
can embrace nothing,
when their children are ablaze,
when their seeds will share
this futile craze.
If I had seen those shapes that float
as leaves in a teeming ocean,
I might have rewritten those vows
in a different tone, with another stone
that doesn’t sink, forever.
Poem #4
Did you Let Go?
Eyes wired shut. Mouth open,
with burning circuits to
shorten our ties, speaking with
deafening voices, screaming
our promises into
darkened hands. We are leaking
those sources, to those fires
where our dreams were
always flaking.
Our forms, shaking
from fear’s relentless
presence. We relive that sentence,
that time spent in a prison.
Locked, in hearts, that
bar us within ribbons,
celebrating a theme of madness.
Are we abandoned?
Another ignored vessel
among a storm,
where lightning shines, like those
lighthouses to lead us,
to deceive us.
You filter that storm
with your outspoken tongue.
You have broken free,
while I remain lost at sea,
waving a white flag
where I drew
a radiant bleed.
Our forms, once shaking,
once taking to that fervent,
deserving taste of insanity.
To spice, that breaks through
thickening ice. To walls
that tumble at a whisper,
when we were fragile within
our delicate reach.
Poem #5
Taped to the Ground
I laid you, bare.
I sealed you. To see you,
dressed without dare,
adorned without honor
to these eyes that stare.
All those rooms
to empty you,
with these paintings
to represent you.
You fade in a bedtime
of shadows,
taped to the ground.
Black dress
pinned to a wall.
White corridors
with blurred photographs
capturing your wails.
I trapped you
to refer you, to inter you,
to wait until you hear me
trickle you towards that edge
where a sunrise
cannot be.
What waterfall? What
heartbeat can be
most abrupt? Your loss
of blood, in a bedroom of
silence. Your violent
tosses to see what,
not who, will bring to you
false roses that do not
ever mean to wilt.
Do I wander in your heart,
like all of time’s limping walk?
I felt your pulse,
I changed your clothes,
before I allowed a garden
to grow for both of us.
I felt I had
changed you from
sadness into sunlight.
I swear I had
not kissed lips of rust.
Here, being left
to fill in those gaps
with stains and overlaps.
Here, to sleep
in curtaining silence.
There, continuing to weep
while mourners shoulder you,
winding you back
to those same familiar,
departing tracks.
Do not find me, under rain,
heavy with pain. I will
discover a different bridge,
another river
to embrace another nakedness,
to expose fleshly emptiness.
Poem #6
Bleed what’s Never Lost
Recognizable cost.
Territorial loss.
I am even with your thoughts,
holding your trembling hands.
Fabling on dimmest realities,
screaming in closets
for closure’s clarity.
Losing our trail,
on a crippled horse.
Moving backwards,
while weather
keeps getting worse.
I leave bottles open
to count droplets
in unified rush.
One barren journey
to see where we divided
our asymmetrical petals.
Washing our eyes with soil,
flooding a space
beneath our feet
with dried tearstains.
Are we leading our moments
over into recognition?
Forgetfulness. Regretful pools,
where a moon will glow
for another second to a year
continuing to leave tears
as diamonds
for impoverished oceans.
Toss a coin
into a fountain.
Take another flavor
of wealth from these
losing sides. We blanket
our forms, in war.
We have buried
our streams, in roots.
Beginnings with nothing
to hide, except for
what we reveal.
Poem #7
Drowned in Ripples
To color, dynamic. To skin,
aromatic, in what comforts us,
conceals us in reflection,
divides us, in selection
for whom will remain here
closed behind doors, open within
flooded corridors. We are
bandaged, in each other’s arms,
seeing pain, never tamed
in mirroring eyelids.
Passion bites. Nerves excite
all our muscles to move us
once more, on a final twist
to a connecting kiss.
All our veins, like stretching boughs
reaching out like barren fingers
without rings of promise, hung from
a trunk with rings of age.
To autumn, enigmatic. To death,
symptomatic. We are wired,
together, feeding our same soil
with Heaven’s teardrops.
All I loved, revives itself
as an uprising against all that floats
to my reach, all that extends towards
my parched, silent lips.
For a split will occur
to divide me, once more,
in this engrained, tearstained
place of continuous storms.
A mist will cover,
as a sun will forget,
while what’s left
are endless, discolored leaves
as a trail, for a time
of terminal grief.
Poem #8
A Breath we Never Held
Funnel those
teardrops, into this open,
discarded mouth.
I still miss
tastes of a sunrise,
blooming without disguise,
as we caressed
stones on a rough road,
stressing for finality
to release a breath
we held, and could not
ever use to turn
our eyes, behind.
Funnel history’s glances
down insanity’s laughing throat.
Pour down all your bitterness,
as I remember it,
as I only remember it.
I realize
that you are past
a mere sunrise.
A beauty whose eyes
have become that sunrise,
and have never set
into an ocean’s depth.
You’ve found your own breath,
and kept me to death’s
simple embrace.
I will wander over
a skeletal bridge,
shouldering all those tracks
I cannot remove,
nor take back.
Poem #9
Mutual Resonance
Carved stones. Eyes, hidden in
history’s puddle, where we
are seeing the same scenery.
Listening beneath, from above
where rain falls from coated clouds,
too cold to snow.
As we are too tired to sleep,
we hold on for as long
as Heaven will weep.
Fortresses made. Tearstains saved
on those white curtains that
hide our forms, within identical dust.
We are sheltered from disaster,
seeing stagnant skies
speaking our brittle names,
drawn in dense sands.
We were not meant to survive
cold wars. Cured by fragile kisses.
Blown over. Dressed in
each other’s flesh, healing ourselves
with a torment called love.
Fallen, under suppression,
as those who get caught beneath
drifting monochrome.
Bound beneath
thin cracks in drying soil.
Holding hope as a vase
for another’s springtime vanity.
Freezing this puddle
for another animal’s eyes,
rediscovering our blindness
kept in disguise.
Poem #10
Love’s Drunkenness
Here’s those petals,
scattered. Clumps of gray
dispersed, in surrendering clouds,
hanging low. I have rained
enough lines, to dress
them with letters of scorn.
Burning shapes, worn
while rolling in thunder,
on these defeated shores.
Here’s our faces
displaced in a mirror.
I see where you dance.
Hear you, as you
are weeping from bitterness
caught as lost droplets
in a worthless bottle.
Are you this blue,
floating on an ocean
where we both melted?
Burning throats. Caught sentences,
after a sentence to a cell,
another connection to Hell,
forgetting me, leaving us
in those chambers of building blocks
we attempt to rebuild us two
towards a hanging noose.
A caress to a neck. A kiss
to repeat where we bleed.
Another memory
to test that heat of our fire.
A dream that thuds
in a painful breast. A thought
that hurts in a pounding head.
I’ll force you against walls,
punish myself among
thin layers of both of us.
Modern Romanticism 