KISMET

What does it signify that I stand here now
in a black terrain of tortured stars,
gathering you like a bouquet of hauntings
when you are of no death?

I was met with the prevalent end
by the harm of my wolf-ravished thoughts
to have what the Fates have over you,
confined in a destiny heartless.

Your demise
whispering over my own,
illuming the very tragedy of us…
Though what chance did I have against divinity?

You were a war I wore no armor to.
To think I’d come out unscathed
was merely the mortal self sightless in love
and lanced with order.

Evanescent

The artwork that was your pretense to love—I hung
to stardom; a black hole seeding into its yesteryear
that I admire above my wall each wretched day, morning,
dusk and night, before it fades and so adheres you to my life,
marring my sleep with your last words, terribly lost
in your dynasty doomed with locked rooms of abraded crystal
that my hands cannot hold in perfection nor likeness now,
once prideful of that love that was pure truth and crowning
you my heaven, aligning you to a hell most desirable
that is my desire’s ardor, undressed for you until the end
so as to know the world best when it burns too close
to the wilderness and the birds screeching, garish stars
too close to the candles of steeped autumn—skies sodden
with rain that sears my palms in brightest deception,
your name a cold river inside me, poison oak to my skin,
your dance with wolves bearing teeth in broad daylight
against my neck, your threadbare doll of the sweetest cherry
bombs in my stomach, my revived breath a dawning
of true life that no longer trusts you—no longer ripe—
your betrayal like fire to silk, my cries too docile in past recalling
though I know now to make best of deception, unnerving
you when my sunset drips in your veins in this severe amity,
deciphering the nuances of your expressions in hollow sleep—
I awaken at the closing of your eyes when you cuddle evasion,
I embed myself in your dreams, I make myself fire, I am thrill
that laurels you with the wintriest blooms of a kingdom
where I do not exist except in the glint of your final regret,
your religion of weeds leading me to a paradise fissured
with your forgetfulness—your blindest state of essence—
allowing the soul you were to be what I most revered,
fooled as any fool in treachery, somber in the eyes,
knowing now that it has done to the world I garden
what I cannot heal back to life, quelling evanescence
as the blue sky isolates from roots, vanishing you
in a bind farthest from rest as any grave thing can be. . .
where you exist the same as your love exists:
fleeting.

Softness

You come apart in my hands
as an old cracked seashell does
and something about the sea
smells of lilies galore, or some dream
of your skin of water,
dripping from the clouds.
Your last words remain
like fossils in the sand.
Your spirit ebbs free and close
as the sunlight across
the most indigo of horizons.
Do you remember this place
as I remember it?
The seagulls and the spun-gold
of mornings when light broke.
The sky a lacerated breath, and the blue
a grief backboned to me…
Shall you remember it
as we remember death?
For the air will take with it a softness
that I am, and am no more.

Wunderkind

Echoing music still carries…
These roads still follow me
towards your smoke.
And if you only knew one truth
of how you still move through me here
like some blade on skin.
How your embers still pulse
upon my heart that, too, burns ruby,
charring in the driveway where we used to talk.
Where our spirits lie now
spent under scattered moonlight,
awaiting a dance of love and revival.
Though my laughter disperses, haunted
as a torn poem refusing to mend,
I call to you among the desolation,
remembering the blueprints of our history—
you, me, your lovers,
the moon,
and something worth trying.
But most stifling.
Your rose thorns punctured
like claws at my wrist.
Everything a stasis of open wounds.
My knives on my own back—
your beauty always did that.
Sparkles from my nails on my lips
and the ashes of Menthol’s in the wind.
Lost in translation.
Bones beautifully chipped
as the faux jewels winking green and pink
in the rust of my charm bracelet…
Mislead renegades silent
in a moonlit drive that took us home and back.
Your face my catalyst—
my ever-present blind spot.
Never seeing where I’m going.
Always feeling every fucking thing
that you are.
What good is my youth now?
I shroud myself in the earth
and face the bloodless sky,
pretend it’s a shadowless kingdom
pure and survivable.
But yet it rain-drops your ashes on my chest;
pearls that crumble in my heart
with passionate rage.
I embark on a legion of winters
to learn the way of tsarinas now.
I go with the clouds—I must.
Leaving you and the dwelling.
Your soul forever contagious,
livid as nightmares inside me.
A lover of no relief.
It was just like you, wasn’t it?
To wash the world out to sea
and starve a wunderkind,
cursing our youth
to a threadbare place.
No, we are not alike.
But our secrets are.
We burn in different ways
that sear us together.
Afraid to seek closure
or speak at all of the corrosion
this love so deeply sires.
Two souls in their crossfire,
coming to an ending
of a vicious calm.
An old night falling
over us, eternally
forgetting the taste
of true happiness
in a wreckage
of a world
we didn’t
ask for.