I am painted eclipse black

My soul’s paling colours

Sucked, swilled and spat

In a bloodletting coup

Scarlet letter inked

In brushfire cheeked shame

This heady thirst and wretched hunt for light

Martyring sallow sheeted flesh

Like droughty dandelion beds

Matchless against a slaying sun,

The butcher of colours

Executes a swivel-eyed stampede

Evicting coma drunken wishes

And shaken stowaway dreams

Dragging my wilted anemone feet

Through the salt eaten corpse

Of bedeviled black seas

To pickle this imprisoned skin

In mummified reptilian sheath,

And I am bruised and slit necked reed

Swaying through opiate hushed calm

Singing the piper’s death march hymns

Beneath a hanging noose moon

Over ivory legged cloud,

Yet I have eaten up nightshade’s bitter spillover fill

And toasted my ghosts a vagrant’s farewell

And I will devour the towers of hooked black vulture rains

To steal back my colours

From death’s blitzkrieg of fangs.

I once dated a man who was obsessed with the song Ave Maria. It should have been the first and last red flag. But true to form I churned the image of him into art. Something deeper than he was. Which is where my story begins. And dies. Just does my hope for love, everlasting. I think, sometimes, that I have given up, or perhaps I never started. Not really. Pipe dreams and unrealistic fantasies borne from fiction and make-believe—but only it was my imagination, she said. High for just a scream. I sit here now, sound— bottle: half empty; memoir: unwritten. What a failed fatale I have been unto myself yet alone to others. Echo alone, alone. Gone, gone she blows lost drawn by the wind, dust begotten is the now. Mist under sun. Breeze-sneezed. Scattered and strewn. And missed.

If I could wrap

Each part

Of my body

Around you

And hold you tight

Forever

I would hate myself

For keeping you

From the world

If I could cook

A meal

To equal

The feast

That is our love

I would hate myself

For allowing gluttony

Into our lives

If I could

Hear

Our beating hearts

The synchronicity

Of a moment

I might

Remember

A from z

Or maybe

I’d remember

What is

To be

Me

And that sometimes

It’s everything

That equals nothing

And nothing

That equals

Everything

she would talk

to her flowers

as if they were

friends & lovers

from long ago

except

perhaps

for the old peony

whose silent smile

hid secrets

she didn't care

to share

she feared

not the future

she had planned on

but those shadows

that whispered

of all the sins

she long ago hidden

behind a shattered smile

in that moment

we were stealing whispers

and sharing kisses

dreaming of those mornings

that were yet to come

and laughing

at those moments

we shared

with yesterday

triangles of tissue paper

held upside down and

held between two fingers

like a dying bird

you have become the most

ordinary version of yourself,

the one who can bend into

a high street kind of shape

when did being human

become important to you

brown paper bag souls

sold by the pound on the

street corner by your house

the world is simple when

you make yourself simple

but the divide becomes

ever clearer, the illusion

rats living in the world's

most glamorous sewer

gnawing on bones, rags,

tissue paper, and souls

until they can no longer

remember the warmth

of their own sun

When two

join hands

one turns left

the other turns right

and impossibly,

they meet the middle

and make a promise

becoming one