Travel

We're on a train in the night,
accelerating with such a solid relentlessness
it sometimes seems we'll never be able to stop,
we'll just barrel on through the coaldust darkness forever,
ghosting through the skeletons of ironworks
and the shuddering bones of dying industry,
watching civilization level and smother the landscape,
watching flora and fauna slowly but inexorably claim it back,
watching the atmosphere oxidize the shining lines of the city's arteries,
watching each capillary turn to rust,
watching the blood rattle tiredly on.
Bleed it out, bleed it out, bleed it out.

Two

sunbaked and wasted
the beach holds all my secrets
digging fingers reveal all

--

pull me in, hide me
kiss my lips, my sanguine hips
clothed in thistledown

It's been too long since I've written haiku

the smell of the night
makes me want to run until
I can't get back home

--

you are embarrassed
and I'm just amusing, so
why try to hide it?

--

funny how sleeping
makes everything go numb
and fade to fiction

--

it's an eraser
or an ice storm, blurring to
surreality

--

I'm fading, aching
leaning, with lights flickering
I sink into you

--

I miss your music
even though now it only
makes me all empty

--

exhaustion, you see
is the most addictive type
of psychotropic

This is obsolete

We are floating on a picnic table in the sky beneath a harlequin moon. We drift out over the edge of the precipice, singing, laughing, mendaciously carefree. Every smile condenses a little more-- the moon is twitching, leering down from the clouds, the silhouettes of sedentary ghouls. The trees are melting as the air begins to hum, sounds dripping past hearing, into pure feeling. I stave off jealousy with denial, but you are phosphorous. The night is vibrating as I pull you ever closer, eyes shut tight against your plurality, against nothing wrong, against everyone else. I hide truths in lines of ruby down my back, absorbing, mending, darning all the loose threads in the stories I tell you with a lunar grin. The sky ripples disconcertingly as the crew of our picnic table/boat/zeppelin shifts uneasily. A lion roars through the reeds and I shiver with wanting, with waiting, with never-having. I steel myself to take what I can, give nothing back, and smile like the moon.

This is old

She stalks ever nearer, raindrop footsteps on the soaking grass, shadowdancing, cloyingly coy, unreachable but never quite unsensible. Her taunting tainting eyelids, dark with laughing, shining with flirtatious sidestepping, hide nothing; I don't need to see your eyes to know I'm being played with. Roadmap toes caressing the mud, she waits to run. I tie on my blindfold and give chase.

Insomnia

I'm mesmerized by fireworks and thunderclouds, lying on a sinking island in a swamp of navy and sepia, alert as you sleep, crushed, failing, falling as you rise. Overcome, as always, by hesitation, there's something hooked behind my solar plexus that won't let me go.

Caught unanchored in the center of a counter-current cyclone, I'm adrift. Catch me, my cavity; collapse.
Pure lymph, pure ache, purely hollow.
Collapse.

AP Portfolio Concentration

[To be read sequentially. Click a photo to enlarge.]

Cold

We are traveling forever, crushing the ground with fibers so much more efficient than gears, sanguine levers greener than cylinders, feet more silent than wheels.

We run endlessly across Antarctica, and the only sound is our breath freezing into glittering clouds of ice.

We laugh soundlessly, and the night sparkles.

Endolymph

The walls are breathing as I lie tilted and tumbling slowly in the cotton darkness. I can feel your arms around me like ghosts, cold with waiting. Lids close down and the universe shifts twenty seven point four degrees left and sixteen degrees back right as I jerk ahead and stumble over a crack in the floor that your dripping faucet forgot to mention as I crept across the cramped and crumbling tiles in search of a patch of air to place my potted plant, somewhere where the walls don't steal all of the air to sigh it out, chilled and empty, against my blind and blinking wrists-- pale, taut and trembling, always waiting. I focus my retinae to needlepoints to create a tiny one-moment, one-centimeter void, a lack of sensation, a relief on all fronts; potassium gates locked, pumps off. Sighing out to acidosis, concentration dropping, fingers twitching, pulse racing and nerves crackling. My bones release sounds and stiffness into the soft shoegazed abyss, but they leave energy with no will, windows with no shades to cover the unfortunate exhibition.

Winter

I'm getting lost in static snowdrifts
Waiting, wandering, shivering
Straining my tired eyes, trying
Trying to see through the miasmatic flurries
The frozen fury.
I can't feel my toes
Can't bend my knees, anymore
As roots creep down, twining
Out of my hips, my shoulders
Sinking into the ice, into the asphalt, bulging, twisting
So
Very
Slowly.
Lethargic nostalgic squeezing
Unnoticed, unconcerned.
Undiscovered.
Steadfast and wondering, I wait
Beneath the clandestine streetlamp
With my back to the night and my face to the wind.
Squinting, tensing, waiting
But you're never coming, are you?