Embalming Roses

Whisper your palms upon thorns, 

As honey drips, drips, drips on scars,

Lush satin embalms the raw pink seams

Budding from moisture and the marred.

Shuttering, hallowed out faces,

Through xylem, exoskeletal rain, 

Blankets blooming from oil,

Shrouding the skin with pain.

Tunnels, limestone unlit,

With torches to tell the time,

And petals, stiff with the blessing of tar,

Once flush with color and brine.

All stops, emblaze, the beats emanate

From the rose embalmed and soul innate.

Lost Wax

Cataclysmic tempests gnash, pull, tear,

At the manes of the spoke-turns.

The most dangerous game, hunted

For pipes and hallowed serotonin -

Crawl, fistfuls of sand, diamonds

At the masthead.

Fission, fusion, melting through the salt

Flares, sun-spot, granulation

Crepitates beneath concrete bedsheets,

Scintillates under pacified minds

Who fail to accept the estimate

Of open moorings

Left in the bay.

But I'm sane

(Throat coated with codeine dreams

Scratching to reach the surface)

Please believe me

(They're clawing at me, repousse 

With flesh and gold)

Hear my voice

(I hear it, can you? Lost in

The catacombs, winding

Through past, serpentine)

Cold blood, or is that water?

Hold me. Caress me.

The child flicks the marble.

It doesn't stop rolling,

But the statue appears.

The sage and the archangel,

Venerated for wisdom

Healing crack visage.

Temples pounding

Sacrificial chants

Checking my pulse. 

I am the wanderer over

My own stream, corrode

This sheath, corrode,

Dripping hands, arrows,

My only direction.

Golgotha, stems

The wingéd South

Reaps carousels from Fata Morgana.

My halbirdier marches

Stag, follow the cast. 

The Arbor (Lace)

Forth into arbor.
Every movement entranced. 
Circuitous lulls dissolve themselves 
onto thin, silky lace.
The web envelopes the coastline - 
Ethereal in origin and the present,
The connectivity tactically, carefully
Navigates amongst the leaves.
Evanescence latches to absence
As dew blossoms into shade,
Baptizing the rocks below.
A zenith sways with the hydrangeas, 
And lapses of time
Bitter the salt water breeze;
These wait for Asclepius, 
And for the Peonies
To shudder in the warmth.
And these lapses
Prick the finger
Through purple velvet,
And a bead of blood,
Carefully, tactically,
Surfaces.

The controlled beauty;
A stain,
Until the arbor
Becomes tangible once again.
A deep burgundy drips slowly, softly,
Mesmerizing the ghosts of the lace.

Contrapposto

How relaxed
Can a stance
Be?

Alcyone and Morpheus

Am I entranced, forlorn night fall?
Son of the morning star,
Faint as Aeolus, whispered me,
Blowing through my malachite shawl;
Faint as a whisper that's withered away
Blowing through my malachite shawl.

Stones are rounded by force, my dear.
Sea-glassed son of the sky
Covered my flesh with a gentle veneer 
Of porcelain and marble alike;
With auric pulses preserving my name,
And a voyage no longer alive.

To be Calypso, to embalm -
Honey and silver wine.
Preserve my lapse, ethereal falls,
Beneath the robes of the divine;
Limply drifting, the white lilies sink,
Petals rush in with the tide. 

Your plumes will cradle your father, my love;
Seven dawns will be still.
And through your malachite shawl will come
A dilating tranquil revere
For the smoother stones, captured in space
Between your flight and fear.

Epithalamion (pending further edits)

Silhouettes are often a delusion of shadows.
The small obsidian arrowhead that crashes upon the marble table,
The veil of swirling nightshades constrict themselves upon my delta.
Tricking down,
Shaded by differentiation, 
The floral bloodstream laps up against the clock.
Je ne peux pas parler,
Je ne peux pas penser.
Foreign bindings intertwine along the fragile infrastructure
Of every breath,
The white borders tell so much more than meets the eye.

Je ne peux pas vous toucher.
And they say pines are evergreen,
But seemingly ever gray to me,
And one can only imagine how clouds harmonize with them.
But sometimes the songbirds die,
Or rather, stifle the shadows of the ever grey morgue.
But this is our wedding day.
This is the plaster of Paris 
With us crouched beneath,
And no one knew what we felt that day.
But who's to give instructions?

Sometimes I see myself only as a silhouette.
Sometimes the jagged rocks of cliffs protruding miles into the future.
And I'm frightened.
I'm really frightened. 
Echoes only travel so far
And distance is time.
Solace is found in the strangest places sometimes,
Like the gears of this pocket watch that never turn.

As latitude and longitude is replaced 
By etches of sunlight onto my grave,
Don't lose me.
For we are constantly in orbit
In a world that stands perfectly still.

Tomb 3

Trace the skin

The walls

The pounding of the blood 

Deoxygenated with every helpless gasp.

Every lifeless gasp

Every echo, lavender blooming.

The tomb of perception.

Disembodiment. Disconnection.

Faintly sounding headlights

Step closer. Nearer. 

Nearer than I have ever been; 

My hands reach out, and retract. 

My eyes retract. 

Disillusion.

Five feet. One mile.

I'm dizzy. Nauseous.

Every echo, lavender blooming.

I'm lying. Crawling.

About all things.

Namib Desert

It's always brought some strange familiarity upon me,

The vestiges of earth diffusing throughout every crevasse of my mind.

There is no edge effect here; there cannot be,

For the divergency, the juxtaposition, 

gives rise to mountainous regions far beyond my capacity,

Though vacant I seem.

Vacant I seem, with every glimpse of deserted sea vanishing, diminishing,

In my hands, gently.

But in my blood, in my circuits, or my gears, 

the mechanical factors driving my body to utter insanity,

The mechanical factors lightly grasping onto the last sands,

The next swell pervades the shore.

They've come so close, 

But the impossibility is flawless,

An image perfeclty composed of the dry, the moist, the overbearing heat, and the overwhelming relief.

Perfectly composed, an symphony of only violins and basses.

They've come so close

To recognizing the composer,

To uncoding the edges,

To returning to what they know. 

They've come so close to it all.

But the Namib Desert is opaque, 

not with reasoning, but with being.

Lavender

The iced steeples of drawn out whispers reach out to a place that is far from here,

And not by the swaying petals of lavender,

Nor under the cries of countless horrors,

Do the stars continue to resume their vows of matrimony with the darkness that surrounds them.

The Artist

The air sweeps into the cold, unlit room,

As a single figure, a gentle figure, huddles around his trade

He sets down the blues and blacks of night, the pale skin of mourning, the gold crest of morning, and the soft pink of pain, 

All atop a weary table, where a masterpiece waits to be made.

A palette mixes sky with cloud, lust with shroud, and dust with doubt

An intangible deity, assimilated into a tangible being,

Lingers in the man's old, worn eyes,

As he begins to replace his own, with his new,

A lantern lambently flickering, lost in the translation of a different language.

And so it begins.

He begins.

Again,

For, many times over, his fingers have traced the same path as they do now.

Those soft fingers, no longer his, but an artist's, glide swiftly atop the canvas.

They are a gull, wings spread, finding the currents of the oceanic sky, the wake of apollo's chariots, 

starting a migration to the unknown land.

With the ambitions of Icarus, and the intelligence of Athena, the sullen moon, clouded, gives life to the lost.

He has a vision of her sense of vision,

Crystalline halls with a sapphire tint, 

Deeper blues leaching out of an obsidian orb,

A river delta surrounds the sphere, fading out into deeper waters,

Branches spread, reaching to the atmospheric haze overhead,

As the pacific swells roll viciously, in and out with the tides,

Never monotonous, forever continuous.

Yet, his hands stray from path.

The cerulean of mind blanketed by the intertwining of earthly hues in the heart;

Rich cocoa, this time, dissolving into a golden yellow,

Like a rye field blessing the muddy earth with life, as the earth gives back with fertility,

All capped off with a grayish brown, invigorated with the occasional streak of green.

Her vision was not his, because her heart still is.

A reflection of a tear, yet a controlled inferno rages inside,

Simmering over his right cheekbone. 

And now it's his eyes that are being painted,

As blasts of auburn and Scarlett rise from the ashes of the past.

Violent sweeping arches of gold explode  from the smoldering relic,

His hands grow warm.

He was found after 20 minutes, 

A charred brush balancing between his right hand and reality,

His world had been reduced to black.

His delusion had ceased to be,

And under the rubble and ash of it all, 

The cold seemed such a faint memory, 

As the ice began to creep up his skin.

Tomb 2

I'm in a room

A dark room

And I'm not quite sure how I got here

How I reached this point in life

A monsoon

Drenched me with cold air 

With an empty sky 

Bringing about a different kind of rain

An empty rain 

In this room

Where nothing is how it was

And everything is silence

And I 

Have not thought since

The winter days have passed

Have not dreamed since

Orion's Belt 

Became visible again 

And the roof over my head 

Disappeared.

But now I'm left 

In this room. 

This room with one chandelier

One chair

And no one to help.

And like all tombs do, 

This room continues

To commemorate the past.