A Shadow’s Lament

You cannot know the agony
I treasure in my shape
To cling to you through tragedy
To wrap you like a cape
To follow you in ecstasy
To cradle you in love
But live beyond affections
Where I never feel your touch

You cannot know the emptiness
I hold within my arms
To kneel before your beauty
To have witnessed all your charms
To see you in your glamour
To attend you through the day
And linger in the evening
As you strip it all away

You cannot know the sadness
I must bear with every step
The smiles I have shared with you
The secrets I have kept
My faithfulness is perfect
My descriptions always true
I am your best companion
I know everything you do

You cannot see the pain I feel
When, after all these years
You pay no mind to me at all
And covet other’s stares
I spend my life devoted
I caress you as you sleep
I wait for you until you move
I hold you when you weep

I lay with you beneath the sheets
I ask for nothing back
I slip across your reddened cheeks
I wrap your form in black
I never leave you–never could you
Tear me from your side
I study you and paint you true
My lines have never lied

I fondle you and touch you
But you do not seem to care
My movement goes unnoticed
As if I were never there
But I will stay here loving you
Until the very end
And lie forever by you
When they place you in the ground

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For A Moment The World Does Not Exist

Float off inside the hum
Like a monotonous choir
Of a small mechanical device
Serenading me
I can feel at peace
As if the world does not exist
And I am not in it
But gone
Far away in some dimension
Where belonging is not a quest
And living is not a duty
For a moment I am unconcerned
With all the things that burdened these seconds
With life and love and sanctity
And I can just be
Me

Arts & Crafts

My arts and crafts
Are hearts and masks
Cut out of thoughts
And glued together

Paper faces
Lines I traced
From other smiles
And other places

Take a razor
And a paper
Make a face that
Suits me better

Crude constructions
Simulations
Of expressions
I can’t fashion

Take some scissors
Strong adhesive
Bend the edges
Shape the pieces

Lips for smiling
Eyes for lying
Skin like armor
Just to hide me

My arts and crafts
Are hearts and masks
All colored neat
Inside the lines

If there’s mistakes
We can erase
And start again
With better pens

My arts and crafts
Are jokes and laughs
To cover scratches
Fresh and bleeding

Paper faces
I created
From the things
Left strewn about

Oh So Still

The teeth are out tonight
Just be motionless and quiet
The eyes are on the prowl
Making fearful sorts of sounds

But I learned early life is scary
Everything out to get me
Don’t disturb the silence
And stay oh so still

I learned early no one knows me
Everyone is cold and lonely
Don’t disturb the balance
Just stay oh so still

The mob is out tonight
Just be motionless and quiet
With torches held as swords
It’s a vicious little world

I learned early life is scary
There are secrets you should bury
Don’t leave any footprints
And be oh so still

I learned early life is scary
This disguise is necessary
Never let them see you
And be oh so still

But maybe just maybe
If I don’t move a muscle
The eyes will not see me
The teeth will not bite

And maybe just maybe
If nothing can find me
My silence will save me
And I will survive

Speaking To An Empty Room

It’s like a surgical procedure as I separate the sound
From the things I feel inside of me and how it all turned out
As I tear a little piece of me from underneath my skin
It becomes a rough translation of the state that I am in

Unintentionally
I opened my mouth
And the sound that came out was “I miss you”
But there was nothing to say
The room was empty
And it echoed it back to me “I miss you”

What happened
I’m talking to myself again
I must be crazy

It’s not that I
Don’t know how to live
It’s just that lately

Nothing feels
Like reality
It’s all a little strange

I guess that I
Have a lot to live for
But I just need to say

I miss you
Sometimes I just smile pretending you are there
I miss you
Sometimes I just cry for no reason at all
I miss you
I would not trade any moment I have had
I miss you
In the end I know it’s really not so bad

No one knows the way I feel
Except for you and this empty room
No one hears these little words
But it’s the least that I could do

Unintentionally
I opened my mouth
And the sound that came out was “I miss you”
But there was nothing to say
The room was empty
And it echoed it back to me “I miss you”

And I could almost hear your voice…

Translucent

Do you see me
Am I here
I must be crazy
But I don’t feel like I exist

Do you see me
Anywhere
I must be fading
Why is my face so colorless

In the mirror
Peering back
I must be dreaming
There’s a stranger in my skin

It looks human
Still intact
But I feel hollow
Like a fragment of the wind

I can see right through my tenuous disguise
This lack of substance and this faded enterprise
Maybe now in form I start to realize
I am translucent and I hope they see the light
Through me

Enclosure

Interred in juggernaut walls
Rifted as it were from form well fit
By cause or catastrophe untold
Folded for wilting
Petals lain in tired heaps about this enclosure
Swept up in figure crumpled slumped and sunken in efforts spent
To rend mortar from brick to crack sick structured severance
Laced in loosely laid arguments
Spun for movements yet untaken
In desperation resolve forsaken
Trapped
But not apparent
These exits hid for time when waking reason sheds inhibition
When sense and sensitivity are molded first for what cannot be seen
Which here now resides
Bent in shadow
Drawn for eyes of brighter respect
Whose lenses cleansed again repent the disbelief in trade for what is made
Gentle fingers to trace the contour of this devil’s grave
In truth to discover the clever architect of such cruel monuments
Could not a tyrant be
If indeed as tyrants go a hand external this would mean
Entombed in grave remorse or faded course
For drunken charting in love’s throes
A figure fair and sovereign did fashion such a cavern
If not by reason
Then by lack of will to look beyond a cold unforgiving frame
To name an enemy unseen a thing of dreams or even more a ghost
But ghosts do not here dwell
And ghosts
Though present nonetheless
Do not the dwelling of the living form
Nor lay the bricks
A holding pen
If that is what it is that you are in
May rise but ‘neath the guide of only one
The one in which resides this mortar
This brick
This mob of walls from which is not a certain door
And so laid
Crumpled on the floor
A figure bathed in cascaded darkness all it’s own
To wrap in rags from sorrow sewn
A thing of beauty
A thing of bright elements infused
Of such a race that angels envy for their loves
Disfigured in despair by air oppressed and rent of rest
And yet…
Free
If by choosing she will be
Uncluttered by restraint to paint a stroke of brilliant light
Across a night in need of such
For out the darkness
Blushes paths untaken
Words unspoken
Exits formed of threads being woven by hands which built
Perhaps unknowing
This dim and dreamless dark enclosure
To unravel walls well fabricated
But not from necessity here created
A farce are they
By motion shattered with ease
Poor creature you are not caged
You are not clipped as birds with wings
You are not held within these
As always you are liberated
And have been since when first created
Birthed unclothed and unashamed
Untold untrained and untamed
To build grander things than tombs in which to cower from a world of tombs
A world of rooms
A world of flowers wilted in walls built
By hands not meant for such doom
By eyes fused with colors unreflected without others
Arise to face these juggernaut walls
And find them weak
Made to fall
Spend those finely sculpted hands on other tasks of greater chance and higher call
Lit from a fist thrown firm beneath the tired chest of these apparitions
Move and live and love
And in so doing be the destroyer
Of your saddened heart’s enclosure

24,901

Twenty four thousand miles
The circle of this sphere
Surely somewhere there’s a place for me

Twenty four thousand miles
And anywhere but here
I don’t know where I would rather be

But I would like to belong
And I would like to be home

Twenty four thousand miles
Across this speck of dust
Floating in an endless open space

Twenty four thousand miles
The distance between us
I want to set the galaxies ablaze

And I just want to belong
And I just want to be home

I want to tear apart the sky
Rip the colors from the leaves
Burn the atmosphere to static

If we could light it all on fire
Maybe then I could believe
We could rise up from the ashes

I can’t feel anything at all
But I feel nothing very well
Someone wake me when it’s over

I’ll either choose to sleep it off
Or I will blow us all to hell
I guess I’ll go back to the covers

But I just want to belong
And I just want to be home

Tear Myself Apart

Can you hear the threads explode
As I rip a hole through this open wound
I tried to heal but it won’t stay closed
And the stitches snap like a heart attack

When I tear myself apart
To expose my beating heart
For a lost and lonely world
Let the pain become my art
With the blood my ink to write
As I tear myself apart

Every sinew is woven wrong
Let me shred this tissue and break these bones
Call me human but I’m so much more
You can burn my skin but I’m deep within

And I tear myself apart
To expose this broken heart
For a lost and lonely girl
Let the pain become my art
We will paint our love in blood
As we tear ourselves apart

Reach your hand down farther and feel
There is passion burning there still
From this gash carved here in my chest
Till they dress me and lay me to rest

I will tear myself apart
Take the last of my beating heart
It’s a black and broken world
But the pain is my purest art
And I love you whatever the cost
I would tear myself apart

Parasite

Cocooned within beneath the skin
With tentacles like vices closing
Ever tighter underneath
They tear at me until exposing

How I suffer
Though I try to exercise these demons
I thought I had the strength to face this in your absence

How I suffer
Though I try injecting all of these reasons
But I’m host to all the faceless empty caverns

Wake up screaming am I dreaming
I think it’s eating me alive on the inside
You can’t see it on the surface
But I think it’s eating me alive on the inside

Oh God it’s the parasite
I think I’ve given it a name
Oh God please be here tonight
Before I drive myself insane
We all are an entity
I cannot separate
These open wounds brought the parasite
I cannot amputate

I think it’s eating me alive on the inside
I only want to see your eyes for a while
I think it’s eating me alive on the inside
Theres no resistance for the vacancy you left

Happy Face

I think I need time or space
Maybe just a bit of both
To bring back a smiling face
Tonight it’s out on loan
Not that I’m all that sad
I think it’s the aftermath
Of crying too hard too much
And they don’t make pills for that

The pillows I sleep with know
Oh when it rains it pours
I turned all my insides out
There’s nothing to say anymore
But I’ll get along just fine
And soon I will find a place
To translate these tears of mine
And put on a happy face

Trouble has come and gone
Maybe it hangs around
I don’t feel like checking tonight
It’s late and I need to lay down
The world is an awkward place
For being a sensitive type
There’s too many ways to fall
And not enough help to rise

But I’ve got a drink beside
The bed stand where I will sleep
The headache will fade by then
Along with the rest of me
I do what I can to believe
The choices we make will count
For something beyond these dreams
It’s all worth the cost for now

It could be worse I suppose
And that’s what I tell myself
We have to keep feeding our hope
We have to keep up our health
When all of these tragic times
Have turned into history
I’ll look back and say it’s alright
It’s still worth it all to me

Giving Blood

Bleed me
Take what you need and
Release me
Make these incisions
So deep we
Feel it inside
when they cut
This is the greatest divide

Bleed me
Drunk from the pain and still
Reeling
I’d give the last drop to
Free you
Please don’t be scared
You can have it all
Promise I will be prepared

Wake up strapped to the table
I will keep pumping as long as I can
You can have all of this life I am able
To give you and then I will give it again

Bleed me
Take my inside out
And see me
I will not hide when
You need me
Here I will stay
Give what it takes
Till they take me away