Sunrise/Sunset (Vile Goodbye/Vital Goodbye)

Three years encapsulate the tragic chronology
We are stretched thin over a timeline of romanticized destruction
Like a volcano erupting from the ground
We love the release of pressure
The catharsis binds us to self-harming addiction

I was a sunset when I met you.

Be careful when you love someone who hates themselves Biblically
It will never be a fair fight
When God is on their side
They poured scriptures into you
Told you that your descending weight was the burden of sin leaving your body
Your increased self-hatred was your moral compass pinpointing the islands
Isolating you from the wholeness of God's plan

They convinced you that your sexuality is an impulse
To be controlled by the vapid life of restriction
You are a damaged, unnatural wonder
Who can only be restored by holding your insecurities tightly
As reminders that your body is a cage
Your mind is a master manipulator
Your soul is nothing but a child who got rejected by his father far too many times

Yes, you have been scarred by church
Yet, you believe they can pray the pain away
It is hard to watch you offer yourself up
As a sacrifice to the complex martyrdom
Of self-denial

I understand this life is hard
To be who we are in a heteronormative society
Is to consistently be considered lesser
And to believe that your passing privilege
Will persuade God's wrath to pass over your
doorstep when judgment day comes
And save you from burning in the hell
You created

All I have ever wanted
Was to show you how beautiful the sky looks when bruised by the sun
And that people can still be beautiful after
They have been damaged too

The delusion of saving you has fled from my mind
Attempting your rescue paints the sunset back into my bones
The light I thought I saw in you
Was merely the rising reflection of mine
Recognizing that when I washed my hands of you
and passed over the dark night of your departing shadow
I had become the sunrise.

What You Guard (You Are)

What skin do you shed at night when you sleep?
Snake secret or crabby compulsion?
From hard to soft
As dust mites feast - you are unaware.
Tribute to a small pantheon of arthropod gods.
Your vulnerable flesh
So guarded.
Pain you keep locked up like a prisoner
What you guard.
You Are.

Impression of another person in the vacancy next to you
Pulling back upward for lack of a body to occupy
Its rising pride
You are a vessel of pride
Leaking like a broken faucet
Rusty as a neglected pipe
Affecting weary masculinity
And calling it wisdom
Placing others' lives above your own
And calling it love
Stuff your selflessness in a box
Meant for an engagement ring
Chaste and occasional
Occupy your future
To preserve your dusty destiny
What you guard
You Are.

Cracked oyster of a man
Bottom feeder water filter
Graced by the ever present
Effervescent saline purity bath ring
Of ocean's song
Tribute to a small pantheon of geologic gods
Warmed by volcanoes
Smoothed by the sandpaper sediments' journey
Your smoothness is the byproduct of their dusty destiny
What is your gift back to them?
You cannot offer up the pearl
You guard the pearl
What you guard.
You Are.

Bow bent out of shape
Arrow notched in the embrace of your string
Pulling back upward for abundance
Of a slender body to occupy your rising pride
Pierce the air into a frenzy with your whistling
Suspended in the distance of origin to unfortunate target
To intercept the musical note
Of your economic, ergonomic, aerodynamism conducted perfectly
Tribute to a small pantheon of war gods
Music and violence go hand in hand.
Arrow loosed from one heart to stop another.
Sacrificing innocence to guard innocence
What you guard.
You Are. 

This Body

A black body is an idealized
Physical object that absorbs
Any and all light
And doing so perfectly
As such not extant in nature

This is my body
It absorbs shame
Like a sponge
It is not hard
It has curves in places
That should be straight
And thin like the sheets
of a magazine

I often do not eat
For fear of pushing my waistline
Over the edge
Unacceptable
Look in the mirror
And there is too much to grab

This is my body
It walks like an apology
Aware of steps it should have taken
To prevent itself from ever reaching
It's current state
And beating itself up over it

I have given myself up
To the appraising hands of readers
Mastered in the language of braille
With lack of a word that can translate to appreciation
In their vocabulary
Less reading
More grave digging
I am dead in their eyes
Cold and mute
Like a gravestone sprung up from the ground
Participating in life
As a marker for death
While their shoveling hands
Become fluent in the language of desecration

This is my body
It is not a one liner
But it is always the punchline
Not sharp wit
But soft deflection of the hard questions

My body is dark
Like a mark of cosmic shame
Perfectly absorbing
any and all light around it
Consumer and destroyer
As such not celebrated in nature

Aftermath

Aftermath

The dust has settled
We have been divided
By ground zero.

When a storm comes through
With sound and fury
With thunderbolt and flurry
You can tell.

The land is stricken with the
Swift crack of charged particles
Come so quickly
And gone so soon
That the earth and sky
Pretend that the attraction
Was only imagined.

There are other calamities
That leave their mark
In a more subtle fashion
It's not immediately apparent
Where and how the damage was done.

What does it look like exactly
In the aftermath of anxiety?

You never call first anymore.
You know when you dial my number
It's a coin toss as to who will answer
Me or the misguided wildness within me.
The starved repression.
The self-medicated disaster.

Even when I apologized
and promised that I would give you
all the love in the world.

You could never believe me.

To admit you are sick
Is to have every word you say
From that point on
Taken in the context of your disease.

Baby.

I am not my disease.

I am not the coin tosser.
I am the tossed coin.



I am not the traitor.
I am the neuro-political prisoner waiting for brain
To turn against me to turn against you to turn against me
to turn back again against brain.
Wash the cerebral fluid, rinse , and repeat
A closed loop of betrayal.

I am not the time bomb
I am the wires
I would cut myself in half
If it meant saving you from my blast radius.

In the aftermath
I always call first.

In the aftermath
I am the non-action
Regretting what it didn't do.

In the aftermath
I am waiting for you
to come around.

This isn't me asking for salvation.
I don't need you to save me.

Salvation is not a momentary action.
Salvation is a process.

Tumblr Spells

Serendipity is the phenomenon by which the stubborn heart
nudges itself in the direction of familiarity and attributes it
to the whimsy of some preternatural force.

What have you lost?

A pleasant surprise.
A dissociation of the result from its effort.
A cardiovascular psychosis.

This is the allure of magic.

Who could believe that the late night ritual
of tumblr, sad music, and spiritual hemorrhage
could amount to something real.

What have you lost?

Grave-digging the past
and pulling the skeletons of yesterday
into the present.

Flesh and bone and blood and tendon.

The nerve of you,
the necrotic maniac.
Crazed and obsessive.
Searching through the rifts of time
For the opportunity to say the unsaid.

What have you lost?

Your body of arcane knowledge as atrophied.
The only magic you remember are the bondage spells.
The fetishist predisposition to resurrection that gets you off
on your own ability to imitate life and power.
Juxtaposed against the growing famine of your form.

I have seen you lose weight.
I have seen you refuse meals.
All you drink is mercury now.
So your tongue can move quick-silver and razor-sharp.

As it should when reciting spells.
You only talk in aphorisms now.

Like the relationship between a mage and his magic
is one of trust.

Consequently, trust is like building a bridge from outside in
because building from beginning to end is for charlatans and upstarts.

Yet every time you have brought someone back from the otherside.

They have crumbled to dust.
Grown mad, zombified, and decadent.
Or have simply failed to hear your call in the ether.

Maybe your pentagram was smudged at a crucial energy nexus.
Maybe you were a second too late for the solstice.
Or maybe the virgin you sacrificed was a liar.

Or maybe the magic doesn't trust the mage.
Your past doesn't trust your present.
And it's time to move on.
Get a day job.
Scrub your floor clean of blood and chalk.

Gaia's Arms

Come.

Enter the cathedral that is
My body
My seismic activity
Is merely
The pulse
Of the world

My magma
Flows in tandem with your blood
Do not think I know nothing
of you
I know everything of you
You are of me
Of course

When you were born
Heaved out of the womb
Assembled by the constituents
Of my core and crust
Draped in the mantle of my blessing
My mouth moaned a subtle thank you
Rejoiced as I felt you
roll, crawl, walk, run
Cradled in my earthen arms
My solid body to support you
You were fascinated with me in your younger years
But as you grew older
You resented my guidance and empathy
As all children turn to rebellion

Child -- I have felt the quickening of your anxiety
Trust me when I say I know it too
My anxiety is tectonic
I know all too well the relief of smashing plates
together to release the tension
I called out to you
Reminding you
I am your mother
I am earth
I know what it's like to pull yourself together
In spite of everyone walking all over you
When overwhelmed, look to Mother Earth
I wrote the book on cracking under pressure

When you're depression took you under
Ugly and strange
I cried out
Look at me
Look at my grand canyon
My deep and open wound
And know that not all scars are carved in fits of violence
Some are carved in fits of divine inspiration

Your scars are divine inspirations
Relaying the message
The worst enemy you will ever face
Sits between your ears
Don't beat yourself up
Use your powers for good
There is more strength in creating
Than in destroying

Come into my arms
Weave yourself into my stony cathedral
Pray at the altar of my molten womb
I will heave you out new and immaculate
Coarse Sand must burn before Fine Glass takes its turn
Listen to me
Never refuse help
From the one who said thank you
On the day
You were born.

Tantra

 Press self together into compressed pact of self-love

Hands meld together into flesh-colored hand-cuffs

The hand that holds your hand is your hand

It is re-aligning the lifelines of proximal palms

Getting reacquainted with own body in the flesh grinding psalm

In this way—skin becomes tantra, body of teachings

Sweat the mantra through your pores:

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

Repeat five times a day

While bending self back into shape

Spine, fits, skull, sits crown.

You are so perfect.