Counterplot

Dedicated apparitions
Baited into empty white chapels
Where someone speaks
Who isn’t there
And no one else responds
Yet, in dropping pins
And hurricane force winds
Subliminal messages evacuate lungs
Like ships
Squeezed through a channel mouth
Outbound

Someday, maybe, our dotted lines
Undrawn on maps penned by time
Will meet
Where x marks
An island of thought
Everyone there is you
Each driving small cars
Wearing tan skirts, black shades
And a fondness for smiles
Something akin to babies
Who have not learned
To cringe
To reason sensibly
Or to bend beneath the backwash
Of public opinions

There we are–found
A stuttering ode
To all things bright and beautiful
Cadence like chocolate poured
Softly over pursed lips
And frost bitten fingertips
A counterplot
To rule a world once destroyed
Tyrants abolished
Forsaken deserts of thought
Now holding cautiously in palm
A sea of dreams beneath
Where us
And nothing
Meet

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An Awakening

Flecks of dawn sprinkled carefully ’round
On the crest of your brow and then cascading down
To the curve of your neck and its lands to the south
As I lick up the dew from the doors of your mouth
And they open for me–as a lock to a key

Lit by the paint of a sun come awake
Naked beams caravan on the sands of your shape
And ascend to your hills where they dance on your peeks
Joining hands as they blend into reds on your cheek
Which are blushing for me–like your blood, running free

Stroked in the darkness on opposite sides
Are the secrets which sunlight has yet to un-hide
Buried shallow in shadows that long to be found
Like a treasure for taking in soft fertile ground
And it beckons to me–like the sirens of sea

Earthquakes unleashed by the plates of our skin
Having struck through the fault lines and shaking within
Trigger tremors so faint on the slant of your jaw
I can feel them, but not quite so certain I saw
Still, they tattle to me of your volatile needs

Folded in gold with a mist at your feet
Newly wakened and taken in tryst by the heat
Of the day, now aroused by it’s solar affair
You appear, as a goddess, with wisps in your hair
And you reign over me like a radiant queen

Traced by the rays as they traverse your form
You unfold, like the blooms, in the warmth of the morn’
And alight on the blades of the grass like a thought
Floating weightless inside of my arms–you are caught
And you wrap around me like a cool evening breeze

Locked by the touch of your hands on my waist
We are tangled and tied in a fleeting embrace
I am holding you–savoring what I may take
But you flicker and fade–I, reluctantly, wake
And you vanish from me–you were only a dream

Deep Retreat

Sink below these
Signs of old
Unearthly call
A song foretold
Dream beneath
Dismembered sky
With eyelids sewn
And hearts on fire
Drawn and quartered
Soundless cries
Awake, awake
Asleep it lies
Oh, heartless moon
Oh, voiceless night
Unwind these ties
Which bind so tight
Embrace unseen
In shadows kept
For dance, for drink
For death has slept
And crept here ‘neath
This shallow rest
Not deep, this grave
As fabric pressed
Unformed in day
These denizens
Escort my way
From here, my friends
As chants resound
In solemn tone
Bring all within
And bring all home
Envelope here
A safe repose
Come oft’ before
Our time must go
To me, oh silent
Warming arms
Not flesh nor blood
Not one can harm
To be at rest
To swoon and sleep
Alone, unharmed
In deep retreat

Appointment With Dreams

Tuck your sleepy eyes into their lids
Unbutton your sense of reality
Slip out of the trappings of this life
Place your paper face up for the night

Hang your armored skin out on the line
Zip into a warm inviting mood
Let the tension fall out of your hair
Drink the constellations from the air

Still one more appointment made to keep
Don’t forget to meet me in your dreams
As your body sinks into it’s sleep
Strap your spirit, weightless, into wings

Brace against the early morning tide
Stay with me until we flee the night
Life is never quite the way it seems
Don’t forget to meet me in your dreams

Overtures and Whispered Tunes

Indwelling forms of vain remorse
Listless ghosts relent and fall
Overthrown in passion’s course
Visceral the echoes call
Enchanted wisp arise anew
Yielded on the midnight breeze
Overtures and whispered tunes
Unrepentant angel’s dreams

Electric Galaxies

On silken blades
In rays of bronze and golden bathed
The scent of Aspen dangles
From the overhangs
As spring pretends
It never came

The storms will paint
Ephemeral colossus shapes
When dipped into the dying
Blood of sunlit rays
And we pretend
We’re vapor made

To float away
Into electric galaxies
Accessorized with densely
Clinging memories
And we pretend
It’s fantasy

Slight Glow

By the glow
By the very slight glow
Of a tiny red light
From the charger on my phone
I can see
I can almost make out
All the pretty little monsters underneath my bed
As my muscles let go
And I sink into sheets
I can almost hear them giggling below me
As I drift off in sleep

Mirage

Subtle illusions awake
Taking the form of a figure so pale
Softly enshrouded
Bound and enraptured
Spun in a gossamer web I am captured

Shimmering embers of flame
Mocking the reach of my desperate touch
Drawn and enfolded
Held and enchanted
Taken in silence these storms have demanded

Currents converging in flesh
Stroking the edge of an infinite spark
Fully surrounded
Merciful phantom
Stolen for words and by gaze held at ransom

Surfaces feint and deceiving
Mimic unhindered a contour willing
Yielded for distance
Supple for friction
Perfect reflection and perfectly fiction

Passing ethereal drone
Sheer apparition of dream or of air
Molded from wishes
Vaporous passion
Cruel substitution for form fairer fashioned

Banish this hollow mirage
Scatter this heartless seduction of wind
Out with your pretense
Off with your scheming
My lover warms me much better than dreaming

Close with her skin I am calmed
Drowned in her gaze and revived in her arms
Touch everlasting
Voice ever calling
Drunken in love as a fool ever falling

Devious sleep I renounce
Nothing of magic or myth I require
Bring me the dawn
Give me my life
Let us be dreams for the sleepers tonight

Shards

It’s not right is it?
A train wreck, rain check face with half-paid smiles and fever red lips
Pasted over a last chance resolve that never made it out of bed when the digits dropped
It’s days like this
When badly photocopied eyes
Which couldn’t afford the full color prints
Take up space on that billboard
Days like this
When angel laced asphalt screams obscenities from wheel-worn poverty and the collective reply of the masses is “suck it up
Everybody hurts”
And I ask myself
How it is that we manage such mayhem
Tucked in pinstripes and patted down with disposable lint rollers
To fill a world so desperate for everything else with the one thing we have in abundance
Rejection
Percentage-wise, we’ve never been a willing lot of responsible users
For all our talk, we salvage less and suffer more than skin can show through tight black fishnets on distant side streets
Only to look ourselves in the mirror
With badly photocopied eyes
Lie
And return again
But underneath our ink and recycled paper
We are dying for some color
Just a life less ordinary
In a disposable population
With reusable souls
That do not need to be told
“you look good today”
We need to be held
We need to be picked up off the sidewalk
And, with the shards of our broken mirrors
Shred these simple sub-standard pie charts
And drive the razor edge into our veins until we bleed the deepest shade of candy apple red onto this monotone mess
All the dreams
All the dreams flowing out into a Pollock mind blaze of a stain big enough to wash away days like today
Until eyes speak like Pluto in exile, saying “we will not go quietly”
And the shards of our broken mirrors become tools of redemption
Cutting through hollow point media masquerades and idealistic beauty
Slicing these badly photocopied eyes off rain-washed billboards
Until shards of our broken mirrors become weapons
Our Constantine sign of rebel beauty
Our anthem of being more than a mass of flesh and social statistics
Rebirthed carving out a new generation
Unwilling to dwindle quietly behind conventional wisdom cooked up by cultural bias
And the shards of our broken mirrors
Will become the passkey to a new beauty
A new breed that bleeds bright eyed dreams into our empty streets
With shards sharpened like knives against the skin of what we have been
To shed those faded yesterdays
And set us free
To be tomorrow

Rebel Skies

Sun lit the clouds on fire
Their tender bellies all ablaze
Outrun the rebel sky
To conquer the horizon

Extinguished with the night
We burried bright and golden rays
Before the moon defied
A company of shadows

The particles collide
Ephemeral electric seams
Divide the atmosphere
They reach to touch the surface

But when the dawn replies
Rekindled by the Phoenix beams
Sun fires reappear
Atop the distant curtains

And I split the rebel sky
In a violent forward thrust
Until heaven opened wide
For a caravan of us

In the dying afternoon
Bathed in copper-toned resolve
We were bigger than the sky
And we painted it with love

To Sleep To Sleep

To sleep to sleep
To rest and dream
To drink the night into the veins
To sleep to sleep
Recline and lie
Within a dark ethereal plane
To sleep to sleep
To find you there
To flee this waking revelry
To sleep to sleep
And then create
The world as I think it should be
To sleep to sleep
For just a while
To be released of all of this
To sleep to sleep
In twilight arms
And sink beneath la luna’s kiss
To sleep to sleep
To mimic death
To dance with ghosts and speak with air
To sleep to sleep
To seek your face
To hope that I may meet you there

All At Once

Strickened by a thought I lost the focus for
Like a dream that drains away before your eyes are wide
Overtures of other days and other words

But I’m not quite sure
How the lines are connected

And I’m not quite pure
But I fought these infections

It’s the lives we make
Out of wakened affections

It’s the chances left
For a place imperfected

All at once
I see you
As you always were
In the corners of my mind

All at once
I see you
And I don’t deserve
How the love you gave was blind

Dim Perfection

Autumn ushers overcast reflections
Flannel wraps and woolen hats betray the frailty of
Skin and bones in all our dim perfection
Knit together, fit and clever, better made for love
Harvest sprinkles carpet leaves for winter
Tuck us in our crafted dens like hibernating bears
Bring us dreams to compliment the weather
Sleepy eyes for stormy skies ’till I can meet you there

Wrap Me

Disguised
As a fugitive bird
In the tall of her grass
When the foxes are out

With eyes
Like a kerosene lamp
When the wick doesn’t last
And the flame is burnt out

But I
Know a place to escape
Where the world doesn’t see
And the foxes won’t tread

Inside
There’s a labyrinth of shapes
And the essence of me
Like the words in my head

Wrap me in metaphors
Cover me in lines
Paint me in cadence
Cradle me in rhymes
I will find peace here
If no one finds me
So you be the rhythm
And I will be the poetry

Midnight Sky

Tug a cloud from the horizon
Wrap the atmosphere around
Snuggle warm in constellations
Floating weightless without sound
Dance the milky way to nowhere
Set the particles alight
Turn your eyes a little brighter
Underneath a midnight sky

To Banish The Dark

Wield the autumn leaves as weaponry
Recruit the trees and we will hide
Beneath the veil of certainty
Beneath an orange broken sky
So many others have succumb
To these devices so seductive
Catch the wind and we will run
To where the world is less destructive

We will banish the dark
Turn on the stars
I want to shatter the dawn when it breaks

With nothing apart
Living the art
These are the signs of a beautiful day

Shove Off

On the shore before a looming blue expanse
With a paddle in my hand

Under storms without a compass or a map
Leave a message in the sand

I lay down beneath a thousand burning thoughts
In the hull of my repose

And shove off into the ocean of my dreams
To a destiny unknown

Goodnight.

Enfant Terrible

Sorry so sorry what can I say
Crashing your party so scandalously
Are we oh are we just horrid that way
Black tie affair and we made such a scene

Sorry so sorry we aren’t fitting in
Wearing our costumes and hearts on our sleeve
Are we oh are we a bother my friend
Spiking your drinks with our flavor of dreams

Sorry so sorry such social disgrace
Minding our manners so poorly it seems
Are we oh are we this far out of place
Taking conclusions to furthest extremes

Sorry so sorry the guests are appalled
Staring in horror at chances we take
Are we oh are we so destined to fall
Step after step like the dances we make

Sorry so sorry a blot on your name
So unrefined and unnervingly bold
Are we oh are we completely inane
Bats in the belfry or so I am told

Sorry so sorry we’re not in your class
Desperately daring with arms open wide
Are we oh are we the best and the last
Sacredly strange we are rebels with pride