I stood upon a roof, waiting,

I see her there, still.

A pale form among all the green

Where I once stood,

She was apart.

The sage night waited,

But I saw her, still

In that strange sleep where blood runs cold,

And I watch the silver thread of a vein

Leave her lying form

And find me, so far above.

Around my wrist, I feel

The whisper of her.

It leaves me.

Every thought that stirs

In the dark of my mind

Sounds the same and

Always will:

How terrible it was

For Death to hold her in his arms,

And for me to love her still.

At the end of the boardwalk I sit. A saline breeze stirs the drying leaves, whistling in Summer eaves. They kept her ashes. The water laps against the rotting wood, the same as every year. They took her and held her and now they keep her? She lies somewhere, ashen and light, finally away from them. This was her time, her final time to be reunited and then unfurled into an old world. I didn’t get to hug her, nor tell her that her truth was something worth leaving for. I didn’t get to tell her that I wanted her to stay. I’ve become a little girl again, selfish and tugging at soft maternal sleeves. From before, I remember some some song that said: “sadness is a long brown ribbon”. I know now, it is. It’s silken and smooth and I want to tie my throat with my mother’s brown ribbon. I want to gleam like saint in the new sun.

Louisa always liked the firemen

Who burned the dim woods,

Who smoked out their truth.

And what remained took to a shadow,

Cast by their unholy light.

When they don’t burn our skin

“They keep us warm”

She laughs

Laughed

I wish it still echoed.

Louisa once told me

That she had a dream

That her hair was long again,

And she was a girl again,

Still sweet.

That we didn’t know our own cruelty,

And with her carmine lips she smiled.

She told me that those eyes didn’t belong to her (anymore)

But still,

They looked back.

Louisa and I sit by the gas station,

Sat

Miles away,

It looks the same as this one,

All emptiness looks the same.

We would sit on the hot concrete in our cheap skirts,

And pull at the weeds,

Satiating the need to kill

To control

That all we have,

The ground is hard here too,

But the neon’s far too bright,

But if she closes her eyes,

It should be alright

Louisa lived elsewhere

But I think she died here,

I can’t change that,

And the clouds are dark

And so it falls

I lift my eyes

To still look up,

Hope

Looking for a fabled arc

That Louisa would have loved

But it’s just sky

All above.

I wake up to the sound of trees falling. I hear I-love-yous and I know your blood. Crimson and siphoned through tissue, mostly unseen. I feel the strings of death that tie me to bed. No wonder you can't kill a god. Any kind of end is too quick, too kind, for something of such magnitude, such power. Everything inside me has been torn out, tossed to the corner of my room. There lies nothing of consequence: dust, toys, I hear the screams of a young boy as he runs from his father, Jenna's sweater, CDs from last week, candy wrappers, cars turn corners, racing, running, heavy breathing, hearts pounding, beating, stopping. I can make it stop

I can't sit up but I can make it stop. End. I sense it. But, they laugh and they yearn and they hurt. They live. Somehow. Who am I to strip them of their horrors? Who am I to leave them awake, with all the terror they create? The strings pull tighter and tighter and my veins, my skin, my self splits. Among the floral sheets lies a mosaic of reluctant divinity and blood.

I close my eyes.

Twice upon a map

The Lesser being took its cradle

And rocking, pushing, flipped it upside down

The world cried and laughed and toppled with glee,

Water falling free, rippling sickly sweet,

Tender tendrils reach and weep,

Finding themselves suspended.

No, no, no!

It echoed

Searching for its halved bright-ball,

Partly lost and shocked and gnawed,

Swiftly, it had fallen, into a cliffish sky or sea,

As neither made sense to our Lesser fellow as it be,

Neither it could touch, and neither seemed to see

How their shifting blues had stolen its clemency,

A crowned guardian sees from further away,

Striped in papyrus, unchanged and unnamed by the new-world antics,

Matronly and patiently,

With a feeling for the end, they must wait.

To destroy and create is fine,

But the start, child-light and this world’s new birth,

Equal promise and danger lurk

To let it consume all would be no good

So the being watches and waits

As any deer mother would,

For the time will come,

When the cradle must crash, and

The Lesser must drown,

Swimming with stars in their land.

The time still passes,

But the Lesser does not grow,

It is stuck searching for its toy-moon,

Lost so long ago,

Its rebirthed world is left alone,

But no world can live with a deity dethroned

So the tentacles grasp, and the chart outgrows

The paper given as a home.

Even still the crowned-thing waits,

And waits again for it to change.

Then come clouds, with their lofty highs,

Smoke and fire burn their eyes,

Some stranger sings into the madness,

And dust stirs up,

Beating the pillars into blackness.

The guardian sighs, and claws its calves.

There remains a glitter in the celestial bath.

It bares its throat, and calls upon the Lesser

Who refuses to come, so the being enters,

It calls the night and dark and murders the storm,

No clouds to come, no fire to warm,

It rips the charts and steals its ink,

Flooding the cradle, the godly bed sinks,

Until the waters are black

Every void turns red,

When the Lesser itself twists its head,

No longer a child,

No longer bright-life power it holds,

In cold empty hands,

Its world is no more

The Greater being has done all

As it knows it would have done most.

And it waits for the world to dry,

And the next Other to be lost,

And amidst the red, and the black and the little blue,

It sees a moon in the primordial stew.

Shivering reeds are ember green, bronzing in new-world delight,

The virgin quiet has its garden picked, apple-heavy breezes thick,

Laurel sap quick, mixed with something brick-red,

To wait so pale, we abide by a flickering moon,

Awaiting a green-world, man-shaped still,

We don’t fit.

Slipping a simple summery spell, it shifts,

A wren made poppy-red for a marble chant,

Feathery voices yell.

The river swallows and swells,

Every gathering of sweet madness chained by a knell,

Winter suffering is akin to hell,

Every soul is made pure.

Blue-faced dawn breaks that bell

For all is all,

And all is well.

Neptune’s night, your birth was bitter.

Ink-eyed child, you,

Find another to kill.

With a drowning voice you rape my dreams,

The path is branch-crooked but clear.

I think you would float

Your hollowness bringing you closer to God

than you’d ever let me be.

You left, following the scent of petals from some other meeting,

Some other matrimony,

Some other life.

I’m left with eyes and skies oath-dark,

A kind of anonymous light you'd never see.

Will you die heavy, fulfilled?

Is it much brighter there?

Are they much sweeter?

Your spawn more human?

Did you sink?

I know the place but it’s filled with such black anger that I cannot

…Do you remain?

I was pretty okay with being a kid.

I sat still and soaked myself in the lulling waters of childhood. It's empty now. I didn't want to be older. The haze of girlhood--something to be penetrated and dissipated--was unknown to me.

There are hollows in the ground from where I stand still and look back.

Crow-dark and crow-hoarse,

Sweeping black trees bend and break,

With a crack they fall,

We walk on,

A river corpse-deep and sure,

Follows us,

Thigh-high grass wilted,

Crack! They freeze,

To grasp with hands,

The feeling is lost, somewhere by a friend,

Somewhere, not close, is this the end?

Dare I hope for more? Or do I wait for it to-

Crack! Another falls, another walks,

I hardly hear them when I step on my own.

Crack goes our hope,

And the sighs, long and known, were soft once,

Not now, now they are hard and they Crack!

To the ground, to the mud,

The rain is new, so the grass rots, and the mud grows,

And the dreams drown,

Heaving one final sigh, one final Crack!

A crow yells, the first person ducks,

The rest follow, the sun is nowhere to be seen,

Footprints, footsteps, ice, dark,

Crack! The crows dive, and

We all fall fast,

Eyes closed, air cold and black,

Crack (is this the end?)

Crack…

May was not the time to blaspheme,

With smooth glades of ache to drown

The alizarin voices of hate.

Their hard hands,

A swirling crescendo,

Pummel all passion

Into a lasting shower of pain.