The distance between our thoughts
Addles the simplest dreams.

I observe them with my eyes, akin to yours,
And, in turn, the ring of colour gleams
A blue, a sea of endless shores.

My gaze, fixated on all you have to offer,
Is met with a shifted glance.

I catch it with words, companionship,
And in return begin a knotted dance.
My effort shows. I trip.

Our paths, knee-deep in rubble,
Lead hazily into the water.

I breathe carefully. I regard silently.
These dreams ready for slaughter.
Yet, our harmony, whispers a small plea:

Through amity, you have bonded.
Through intimacy, you will swim.
Through interruption, you may sink.

For Todd

A rose in glass sits lightly beside
The small lit candle alighting the room.
A petal falls, gently resting upon
My tear, your sight. Your smile, the bloom.

The red of the flame casts shadows upon
The forgotten passion, the remembered haste
Of my breath, of your song, of my longing for past,
For present, for gifts, for the moments embraced.

A rose has no scent without you to inhale
The romance exerted without attempt or trial.
A flame gives no heat without you to explore
Its warm caress, its fiery lore.
My heart has no beat without you to trust
In the only love I have given, for you. For us.

A walk like every other brings reflection.
His bag casually slung over one shoulder.
Light steps crunch through the darkened white.
A child trudging home as the night becomes colder.

Class ended on-time, no homework to finish.
Yet this boy lingers, with one simple wish.

Though his window presents a tall, glowing tree
And the kitten on the sill knows no distress,
His parents will be shouting, a scene unwanted –
So he holds back and walks in the darkness.

While he walks, he dreams for someone to bestow
Another life, another home, for his injured heart to know.
While he walks, his footprints are washed away by the snow.

Fallen tears rest on an uncreased gown
As she stares at a stranger in the reflective glass.
Bright petals overflow her room of lights;
A room away from home on a nationwide tour.

The men she has loved felt only diamonds in her crown,
Shattering her optimism, her heart of glass.
Her family abandoned for pageantry sights
She had imagined in her youth — an extravagant cure.

Years of curling and tweezing and erasing her frown
Has led to success, a life in glass.
Yet the face peering back is at odds with her heights
And reveals her addled mind, her heart unsure.

A knock wakes her into composure and class.
She glances and sighs. Eyes open, into the glass.

My heart is galloping with the music.
My body, a pendulum, in the human heat.
My eye catches his, vodka gives me a kick.
He moves towards me, stepping with the beat.

My body gasps with his touch on my sway.
My smile beaming through the haze in my mind.
He whispers inaudibles that I giggle away.
His hands go lower; our meeting a grind.

My drunken thoughts envisage a world:
His morning routine, our children, our home
His adoration for me is unfurled –
His hands raise me up as my beer starts to foam.

In the moving loud, I awake below rampaging feet.
The unmusical music unbearable as I rise.
Thoughts go to him as I shuffle through the crowds
Like unfed animals awaiting their meat.
Outside snow startles as my dream, it dies.
Falling cold covers my trail, left in shrouds.

Industry has fouled the world.
The light has been shadowed with
Clouds of greed that appear without end.
The innocents stirring below, plodding with haste,
Ignore the towers of glass, full of will,
That are ready to burst forth roots and finish it.

The ground stirs. Laughing with it
Are the men, the fortunate demons, of the world
As they drill the fertile soul, fulfilling their will
And filling their pockets. Without or with
The nods of the common man, their haste
Builds unearthly muscle, with no sight of end.

Ominous stacks force wind’s end.
The air, shaken and heavy, seizures. With it,
The game of the changed sky flies with haste
Far from corruption, to the edge of the world,
To breathe undefiled breaths, to save life with,
Only to find endless azure of corporate will.

The creatures of the water, unforget they will,
Flow to find the flight of the sky’s end.
Their wings found on blackened shores with
Unheard sounds of pain. Rushing away from it,
The aquatic are stopped with the rest of the world
As the beastly acid rains down with haste.

On looking, the land-bound crouch with haste
As their surroundings form flame at will.
Shielding their eyes, the running fret the end of the world.
But the blaze on the world did not begin at the end.
The first man to claim Earth as his own sealed it.
Now, engulfed, each person afire, falling without.

With
Haste,
It
Will
End
The World.

The planet floats idly as it spins without haste.
Earth, with regret, no longer a world,
Stops idly, willing itself, to not believe the end.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

He falls, corrupt, through heavy doors
That men of God have built to slow
Those night-full men with impure pores
From water holy, from baptismal glow.
He shall be washed as white as snow.

He trickles virtue from mudded hands.
It stings his face. His pupils twist,
Show blood in clots and hair in strands;
These visions from his mind desist
By all the martyr’d virgins kist.

He gasps for air as cherubs stab
His faithless heart through droplets’ flow.
All breath bestowed to his guilty flee.
He, burning, falls, on a cliff’s perilous row
While the True Church remains below.

He lays, writhing, in holy pains.
The murderous sin now an animal cist.
He falls and wails, his body rains
From the bluff into the steeple’s kris,
His remains wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Refrains from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”

Money. Passing through their traps.
Judgment. Poker. Word spent. Craps.
They hurt their self, unknowing not
But then continue, fledglings wrought
For grief Almighty, without time,
Forgive, forget, for none, for mine.

They cough, they wheeze, keep up their shape;
Their smiles laid on with unclear tape.
Eyes fall shut while walking tall.
Sight and view and culture fall
To blasts of green and lust of black,
To wars in funnels. None look back.

Then they trip, fall onto snares
They made before through untold cares
Of real and feel, of tears and fears;
Being, b’lieving ends all cheers
For forgèd gods, for mind’s ignore,
Forget, forget. For mine, no more.

The world stops turning. Eyes reel ‘round,
Shocked at chaos, blood is downed
On circs of grey and visage vert,
On empty, full, uncertain air.

The past is gone, the future aged.
Save the minds, the lucid, caged.
Only once life can forgive
To let us breathe and conquer. Live.

I walk inside and my eyes enlarge.
Mouth gripped I continue, watching flashing lights.
The fabricated walls catch my breath
As the terror begins, with hidden frights.

Screams echo from deep within
The cave of human creation I have decided to chance.
The dark consumes my immediate path,
The light consumed by the ghouls’ foul dance.

The trudged walk of the dead eludes
My senses until it is far too late.
I scream, it moans, a common occurrence.
My party in shambles, me alone with my fate.

My nightmares embodied by ghastly scenes
That I cannot escape, despite my sprint from the fray.
My run is slowed by the rumble of fiends.
Then the lights, the end, the thrill taken away.

Church bells clang as it prowls ‘round the pews
All darkened, abandoned, save the man kneeling still.
His robes in chaos ‘round his plump, unkempt build.
His crime, his disgrace, born from irrepressible news.

Shadows graze his face, unable to abstain
His pools of tragic flaw that remain in his eyes.
The sin once committed, pristine were the prey;
The action engendered the beast of his bane.

Slinking the floors with its large, taloned paws,
It stares and waits for its victim to rise.
The boys playing slowly in his mind fade away
To the red panes of glass, His infinite jaws.

Sin has betrothed his mind to the toll.
Guilt has pounced to devour him whole.