The pale empress

Scatters crimson egg stars

Against a rippled mirror moon

And weaves nightshade loom

Darker than her bruised blue mood

Across the seductive divide

How the stake hearted harpy

Won’t stay lanced to disintegrating ground

Her pin pricked fingertips

Seeding blood orange droplets

That paint such beautiful violence

Behind heaven’s sunset flooded eyes

And her widowed grace

Robed in ghosts

Eats bitter bathed stars

Plucked from hell slanted vortexes

Devouring God’s winking capsules

To black hearted nothingness

And morbid hunger

Spills beyond swallowed snow globe kingdoms

Her targeting dark charms

Set upon souls unaware

As she hatches the stone blind beast

Screaming a night’s siren call

Gripping Eden with phantom reverie

And how we tumble to crushed ruin

Towards oblivion’s razored well

Her acid smile

A massacring masquerade

As death’s blushing ruby pout

On inked cyanide lips

Drains our entire world away

Her palette ripe with purloined colour

This farewell kiss

Such blister skinned sadness

Perfuming her rosehip tragedies

Through a wounded and dying universe.

He inherited chaos through no fault of his own

And the saddled burden bore invisible holes

Into his hatchet hewed heart and weeping willow bowed bones

Where the noise and light would spill out ugly tales

Yet nobody cared enough to follow its telling trails

Except the old man who had survived two unholy wars

And hearsed his napalm scars beneath a splattered canvas of tattoos

Yes, this old man with his blank bullet stare

Gunpowder tongue roasting smoked conversations in the flue of his head

And choking back blurred visions of deadly exits from Khe Sanh

With ashy palms hung down like burnt offerings

Decided that to die a feral coward was unbecoming

So he hobbled his good leg over to the young man

Whose split carmine wrists were laid crucifixion like at the throat of the bridge

And began to sing a childhood lullaby that juddered out his sandpaper mouth

Each cautious note loosed through razorblade wind

Then glued to the trembling belly of night

And the young man who was ready to dance with Mr. Death

Turned back once and fell upon God’s sword of tears in a crumpling heap

As the old man’s eyes burned love’s softest flame

That ate through all barriers both seen and unseen

Like a crushed velvet bird’s numb surrender and spiral

To Hands that tendered impossible care

And when we circled back over that bridge of forgotten sorrows

You could only see one hulking silhouette

Made out of two broken shadows

And with the joy of Lazarus

They shook like a chandelier of stars

As father and son decided that one had enough love

For the both of them.

The curtseying drop of lemon sun

Paints ballroom skies in sinking amber afterglow

Where God’s golden courts thick with honied coverlet

Dispatch a pearly fleet of watercolour winged seraphim

To bolt infinity’s ember eyed hearth of glittering stars

Into night’s dour sackcloth panorama

As obscured eventide

Nibbles at the fading dusky vapours

Of gravity clamped clouds

Floating towards oblivion’s empyreal embrace

Leaving evaporating trails of their drowsy and divine design

While netted blue skies burn into purpled murk void

As Phoebe’s lone regolith eye

Watches proud from her cragged crystalline visa

The temporal closure of another slumbersome day.

Let’s hold a funeral for the self sabotaging machine

Where raw excellence has been dime store swapped

For vacant penned flimflam,

A business model cock-up

For the smarmy gatekeeping elect;

So wearying to keep one foot above chilled corporate waters

And the other dangling into oblivion’s blacklisted scarred trenches.

Where have all the wordsmiths gone?

Asks the dying dodo

Today’s revolution stirred up a caravan exodus

Infirm rattletrap capsules with muffled drum heartbeat wheels

Bounding towards anima’s fleshless horizons.

Trinket necked stars hang like a million glittering fists

Punching through profane cobalt skies

Their decaying vortexes salted in terminal plague.

The next day’s doomsday carnival on wheels

Eats up a venom sun spitting at bone bordered badlands

And toothless smiles mirror toxic miles.

Night vomits out her creeping beasts

And the sidewinder’s maracas

Sting the air with anxious songs.

Her uneasy pneumatic drill

Chases the heedless heel

That dares dip a broiled toe into saw tooth sands.

For the last lingering lot

Of bruised humanity’s obsolete stragglers

Dig rusty wheel and wasted feet into the earth’s scourged back.

And anchored leagues below tombstone spheres

The dune blanketed scorpions

Have already buried their dead.

The dancing quiver of burning bombs resets our clock to zero.

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.

Infant Frankenstein

Was hatched to petrified quiet

Funereal stillness robing her glum half moon fleer

As she lay upon twin orchid wreath breasts

Suckling on disintegrating bonds

Of mummy’s corporeal coffin

Drowning in this silent movie sea

Jailed borders grown strange and grim

From glitter gold toothed moon

To ashen sun slaughtered grin.

How her stitched lace lips longed to speak

How her milked pale horse soul longed to be fed honied love

How her solemn passage was choked cathedral cold

This blooming Arcadian shoot cut down

By gulled Flora’s frenzied reapers.

Infant Frankenstein

God’s embryonic dream thought to life

Such a beautifully tailored offering

Most darkly unwelcome

To these leprous flesh walls pulsing with serpentine hate

And eyed with crimson pitchfork lashes

By Argus’s unblinking lust

Hungry to devour her heart’s fragmenting tombstone smile

And spit out teeth like broken seed.

Infant Frankenstein

Little child cut undone

How you are so dearly beloved

For God’s stepladder chariot is winged roses on fire

Stealing the smoke halo soul

Wrapped around your dried limbs

Shaking free the fragile last breath

Far beyond night’s charred bangle

From hell’s bouquet of dead stars

Into the tethering joys eternal

Of mum’s garden cradle arms.

I am the leper’s pen

Flesh canvas dipped in blood

Feasting on Ephialte’s priestly words

His crouched tiger tongue

Betraying gold framed knowledge

Until the baited lamb steals risk for tarpit escape

From ego death’s afterbirth delirium

And jilted martyr comedown

So apathy bites my cored heart

Down to tear moulded seedlings

Gifting the naked royal soil

Future wildflower crowns

To peasants who will never be king

Because I have written away my very soul

To the world’s insolent silence

The deserted colosseum

A sour resting place

For my bruised and disposable words

Picked at and then eaten by numb blooded birds.

It was Prom Night

Before the end of some world

When malice stalked Alice

Killing her midnite paper doll shadow

Inkless victim to his paling headlight moon.

He unloaded Hell’s flaming acid tongue

Licked her cherry chariot stars

Wearing crimson blizzard scratches

And lovesick dimpled guilt

Under dented hood heavens cradling her cutaway heart.

The roadway home hibernated cryptic secrets

Though Alice spoke without words

Whispering her motored curse to asphalt ears

Between jaundice yellow dashes

His ebonite getaway heels all molasses and chrome.

Alice’s spectre

Became blurred bee swarm motorcade

Encircling his stalled vagrant shell

Her poisoned heart’s fuel

A fatal kiss returned.

Black cherry crush

Black cherry cars

Black cherry moon

Black cherry stars.

Sadness cannot outrun your sun’s laurel wreath halo

Fitted for your gallows hanging head

My precious and sorrowfully crucified friend

Sleepless and taken to hell’s blistered womb grotto

Through bitter black nights exhausted and caustic

Where misery’s dark clustering grapes

Ring through your weathered and scaly hands

Worn dull to age gnawed skin

But look up through bruised blood shade

The wine sheen skies sink crimson glories

And swim Poseidon dashed laps

Around your fragile heart’s isle

Where hope’s charted environs

Land like cloud kissed butterflies

To swallow whole

Those coffin cradle wishes;

So put on permanent silence

The ear piked static

Of memory’s leech engorged mockery

Feeding off melancholy’s derelict heirlooms

In trauma bunker thoughts

Because your shuttered spirit’s captors

Will immolate into splintery embers

And out will deliver new birth exultant

Your unshackled bluebird

Painting cerulean skies over ash doom

Your heart’s abiding protector

That has never abandoned your sunken shoulders

Nor turned from your thorn driven side;

My dear friend

May your heaven stalled hot rod

Cruise champagne highways with raptured abandon

And bubble over dross suckled passage

As the aching road forwards

Trembles with euphoric readiness

Because there is no way that you’ve come this far

To be laid to ruin

Hung out to dry

Or die an empty and jilted

Dead bride sacrifice

For you are a walking masterpiece

Finest wine stained hands

Turning sour grapes into monarch claret

Distorted mirrors be smashed

And lying devils be damned

For your violent will to live

Exceeds death’s dying grasp.