Day Twenty.

This frame you left to me is so hollow it hurts.
Its wire is bending under the pressure and puncturing skin
like the indentation left when a needle is pressed against a balloon.
The burrow of contact in the fraction of a moment
before the collapse and the implosion of being
that once belonged to this barren body.
The flesh no longer covers bone,
the words cannot blot out the worst in me,
and the way your eyes on me sear the curled edges of my being
burns more than the hell fire of this purgatory.

Sorry missed this Yesterday.
Day Nineteen.

Held in the hands of yesteryear
we never would have cradled ourselves
in our cold contentment if we knew,
but the heart of our minds
can never recover the moments wasted
with empty promises of sunsets to come.
Instead today we pick up the mantle of love
and learn to live again in a world
where Lady Apathy no longer lingers
in our doorway on the worst and best days.
Shut from the home of our hearts
she will dwindle and die.
Pick up the mantle of progress
not of hindering spite;
there is a whisper in the wind
carrying the time of change
do not let it pass you by.

Day Eighteen.

Devastated by this disaster
The chaos of cataclysmic clatter
wedged between our hearts
this vacuum between you and I looms.
The day when
Separated by a moment
turned into lost for all time.

Day Seventeen.

The woman holds out leaves of paper
That fall from her hands like autumn
But crash to the floor like a hurricane
Without words he pulls her to him
Encompassing her in his long arms
she doesn’t even try to stretch her wings
just crumbles like the ruins of a decaying façade
letting herself be consumed by something larger than her
He holds her like the binding of book
Trying to hold onto the loose pages of life.

Day Sixteen.

I am stuck
with my face
in my hands
and the words
everywhere
but
the page

Day Fifteen.

Vendetta is a word wrapped in silk
It encoils its bearer with the sweetest feeling
It slides from the tongue in an ever-pleasing hiss
The self sufficient lover of the tortured
The ever hungry beast from the heart
That dwells in the darkest of places
Just dying to get out

Vendetta is a feeling burning in your eyes
Seething with hatred and a promise yet surmised
It whispers tender evils into the innocent ear
And corrupts the benevolence within your heart
Here it is the power to take back what was rightfully yours
To steal away what was stolen from
Dignity, honor, and your name

Vendetta is a promise from the bottom of the soul
To never sleep nor eat until this debt is repaid
Until the tables have yet again been turned
In the favor of the wind
The seductive banter of a word never really said
We know it in our hearts but there it remains
A smoldering word etched into your brain

Day Fourteen

Silence weaves with delicate needle fingers
the lips of eternity together
to protect the world from its whispers.
This loom of words, each string of sentences
used to thread together the flesh of fear
and tie up the loose ends of antiquity
making modern the mask of mystery;
giving it a grin more akin to a grimace
fighting back the suture of sin
that sealed the seventh scroll.
The world will unravel in its own calamitous coil,
we tried to piece it back together
but the piercing hook that once bound
now bends against the hardened flesh
finding it impenetrable and unyielding
even to the craftsmen that created them.
But still we keep breaking our fingers
trying to get a hold of your hearts
to breath back life into your being
and let the ruach make what once
was stone, new flesh again.

Day Thirteen.

Heavy petals feel of heaven’s feathers
Like an angel’s wings
Plucked from the fresh body of innocence
Shorn of shame leaving you bare and naked
Before the eyes of the sun and the melody of reason
Screeches like a snapped violin string
Even your upturned palms
Cannot bear this burden
Of eyes unseeing peering down upon you
This gaze will crush you and your will
Leaving you the shattered broken form
A wingless angel stripped of all that didn’t make you human
This is the disease ridden world
Where the grass against your cheek
Feels like shattered glass ripping into skin
That has never before felt the graze of reality
The voice which is pulled from you is alien
Horrified by the essence of self pouring from you
There are horrors in these hands.

Day Twelve

When the fire came it burned a hole in the porch,
like a portal being opened to the far below.
Sissy used to tell me that if you dropped something in it
you could hear it fall all the way through to the end of the earth.
So one day I took my collection of eucalyptus buttons
and threw them in the blackened pit below;
the jigsaw teeth of the burned out boards
like ivory appendages ripped from bodies of great beasts.
I didn’t hear the sound of falling like Sissy said I would,
So I just stood there with my empty jar,
bereft of years of good keeping
my collection was swallowed up by that black earth
leaving me with the wasted anticipation and the heavy
empty jar. It seemed so much lighter when it was full
even though it weighed down my arms.
So I walked away from the yawning abyss that swallowed
my eucalyptus buttons whole, with a heavy heart of disappointment.
When we moved away a short time later
I left the jar with its emptiness
beside the pit the inferno had left behind;
standing upright on its own, the jar was
the only thing left in our gutted out home.
But when I grew up and years had whittled my cheeks with age
twenty maybe even thirty years later
I went back to the place where the fire started late that night,
hoping to look that darkness right in the eye
and ask the questions that haunted me for so many years.
But when I pushed my way through the gutted cobwebbed remains
of a place I once called home and made my way to the back porch
the darkness was gone, replaced by the outstretched trunks of eucalyptus trees.
The trees rose up in the middle of our porch
the new trunks breaking through the old planks of wood
pushing upward and upward as if to show that they could.
I walked across the deck with slow awestruck steps
my eyes turned upward in reverence of the great canopy.
Drawn back to the earth from the skyward reach I heard the crunch below my feet.
Lifting my foot I held below, the ground was littered with buttons
like a fresh blanket of winter snow.
I knelt by the edges of what once was an abyss and touched the base of new life
that grew in the face of darkness and refused the decree: do not be.
To my amazement, as I knelt there, I found it beside me
Unchanged except on thing, this time when I picked up the old glass jar
it was far from empty.
Filled to the brim with fallen eucalyptus buttons
the trees had replaced the source that had unknowingly given them life.

Day Eleven.

Sifting coffe beans through withered fingers
like they were smooth rocks found on a beach without pebbles.
Feeling each delicately, as if they would crack
crumble and fall away like the shell of a robin’s egg.
Sorting each bean on the counter top of a diner
lost in an age of countless coffee stains
and waitresses with smokey voices
caught in the cloud of cigarette ash.
The old man waits at the counter
with an empty bar stool still left spinning
from the years of memories weighed down upon it
but vacant for these remaining days.
He waits, not wondering for a time to see her again.