My mind is a dry county,
still the residents complain
Of a looming darkness,
Palpable darkness
Like a plague 
Black saliva that hangs form wicker tendons
A sordid moss that feeds on crops
and leaches their harvest
Fierce dark
Piercing 
Stinging like the second hand
On a waiting room clock

I am accustomed to the stench of my quarantine
Blame it on olfactory depression
Blame it on defeat,
On the innate tendency
To yield
I've build a cloister on a cemetery mound
And this is the hill I will die on
They wont need to parade me out for all to gawk at
For a neighborhood spectacle in morbidity
Just plant me in the red-ironed, hemlock sea

"That wasn't me, that was my disease"
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the distinction

"Turns out it's not all about will power"
The lecturer exalted
"There's a science to addiction"
But of course,
There's  science to will power too

I've grown to resent those who enjoy things
I harbor thoughts of monstrous violence
I ignore those who lend a hand
And I hurl spit at sunlight 
I drink straight from hatred
And I've sunk my teeth in lips
Of her whore mouth
A mouth that thunders sultry,
Vituperative utterances
Verbal savagery 
She curses like God's gravedigger
As impossibly vast nothingness
Stares back at her
And I emulate
Like a timid pupil

Our Heavenly Father is a terrible drunk
Bedeviled by embarrassment
With palsy hands
He crafted us
As an extension
Of his folly

There's no award for your endurance
All this hurt was in vain
And all of your rebellions
Were manufactured

God's ears bleed
From piercing shrieks;
Raucously reciting
Desperate manifestos
with pitiful conceit
We traced their origin
To your collagen lips
And ferocious ensemble
Angels weep
Over red horizons bleak
Youth's beauty is fleeting
But her vanity
Remains steadfast
I see this not
As imminent tragedy
For ornate hubris,
In its abstraction
Is the lantern of safe passage
When perspective is cemented
To a burning lifeboat
Rejoice in inexorable ostentation
And every day
Spiked with abundant praise
Shall be a beatific gift
Reject ego death
And let heaven lament
In response to your candor
Urge all moving bodies to halt
And remark
On your spectacular figure
From cosmopolitan to the cosmos 
They'll sketch you
With dazzling constellations
Just know
In your heart of hearts
You'd never fritter 
An enchantress' wish
To stay
Forever twenty-one
For such a folly 
Would yield
An existence devoid
Of nature's most treasured
Amenities
And exclude you
From the coveted paradise
Of well-earned 
indifference

When waking life becomes an irreversible plight 
And your frost-bitten limbs 
drag 
Over molten coal
 Death appears 
as an angel 
Of immeasurable 
mercy

To live is to be loved
What was once dead 
Now shines with divine ardor
Now sings with 
Warm, lurid glee
A soul inhabits me
Soft bodies
Roughly raked
Along the steep,
Rocky coastlines
I am so grateful
To bleed and to be born
When sky was scorched
When stone turned teeth
And floor was replaced
With clownish grins
O! I knew 'twas high time!
To pursue my dreamlife
To rise as a the learned Phoenix
And take my place among the clay folk
I fear not
My departure from these melancholic hyacinths
Who submit to annual decay
The weigh boats
Who faithfully wait
For messianic sailors
To return home
From perpetuity
Struck glory
I have, indeed
For my battered lips 
Have pressed upon
A loud Persephone
Nestled in remedial soil
What gorgeous sorceress
Who wore her lungs like wings
Wings of vineyard bronchi
With citrus blood
And oak spit

i. mother
Your mother misses you
Sweet, cattle-fed skykisser
Strong was the quietus
Sharp, suffer-filled sentience
Viscous, injured quanta
Melt me in cruel spring
Soothing cool, coffin sloth
How you rust and rot
Our momentos are
Glorious daggers dipped in grievous ecstasy
I am afraid
To smile without you
I am ashamed
To laugh with your wraith
Surely, this must be a lie
I remind the same heavenly phases
Happy holiday tapes
I cannot erase
I wish I could be more present for your sister
But I am too consumed
Relishing what is no more

ii. lover
When you left it was death
I could have been an excellent mother to your children
I would have shown them love too vast to be fathomed
But you cut your heart out for work
And crafted a crude Kevlar
And though it shielded you from panic
It leached your exuberance
Hollow-hearted is not synonymous with resolve
Where is the boy of triumphant laughter
Sure, you wear his flannel collars
Sure, you wear his pleasant face
But you don't wear
His character on your person
And I know I can be hyperbolic
I know I can twist the truth
To yield a quasi-Homeric narrative
But with regards to our departure
I am innocent of such exaggerations
O! How I year for those weekend mornings
With well-rested tiredness
We'd fall into our wholesome cove
Beneath silk sheets
Our bodies gliding with ease
Dancing on blue yarn quilts
Brief, fractured articulations
Would allow us to bask in communal absurdity
You were my world
And with a meager half-smile
You would provide me with
Impenetrable armor
And brilliant esteem
Until one morning
You vanished 
And in your place
A frigid anchorite
Rendering me
Untouched

Self worth is as brief as the day is long
Salt air, 
Meets cold sweat
Bull horns, 
Meet porcelain beauty
We breath lust, in lieu of love
These marking belong to a younger, angrier man
The fool who built his home upon sand
After he was lost to crashing waves
I was left with his debts unpaid
I will never kiss you again
Never hold you in my arms
All because I was born with steel for nerves
And stone for a heart

Staying clean for a dead girl
This worldly voyage
Through temptation's domain
Has proven motion is as hurtful
As it is absurd
Zeno walked gladly to grave
And obsessed through impossible days
Hell is no post-mortem sentence
That burns your eternal essence
It's in every stark step and breath
Hell is between here and death
And in the face of impending behemoths
I am shielded by paper-thin virtue
I am revived by deposited sin
I am reborn as anguish begins
Calmed by a plethora
Of misquotes
And comforting, proverbial superlatives
Though who am I?
Who am I?
To deny your survival?
Or the tenets upon which it rests?

We three boys carried your words
Into days and dreams
Dad, you were a scoundrel's mirror image
Spectacularly vivid
Lavish in vibrancy
And definition
Though unavoidably
Phenomenological
Fully-dependent on the impressions 
Of something previous
And actual
With passive force, was my humor crushed
As green glass
Under your steel toes
On this evening,
While the sun sets on your dusted valley
and rises in Hades,
I am called upon to weep over your ruins
And although I plead for tears
 I am woefully unlearned
In such behavior

When I have joy,
My palms sweat
When I have stability,
I walk around aimlessly
O! She's a whimsical one,
We had prosciutto and brie 
Under a Brookline sun
Supply my pipes
With biker gang ice

A soothsayer is merely a good listener
And a devotee to grand detail
People will reveal themselves to you
In brief, yet bellowing fragments
Of sublingual utterances
Rich with holy malapropisms
Amidst the drawn out operas
Of their codified nonsense,
Adorable contradictions
and meandering doctrines,
overtones of essence emerge
Like lustrous, perishing phantoms
Brought on by sleep deprivation
It is the realization of these distinguished markers
That provide me the blueprints
To devise my spellbinding manikins
Mirroring their every mannerism
Achieving unparalleled resolution
And although these loud mouths always grant me their trust
In private,
I wash my face
In front of a vacant reflection