Tobacco

Sap of bliss

Tar of black holes

Stars’ lumens

At the end of fire

My universe of chance

 Rasping

I struggle to ameliorate  

The tyranny of senses

My devotions  

 A practicing subtraction 

 Of stony crops

I thought was harvest

The raised nibs of days

I took as endless, boring

But curls of life’s shave

Smoothed out to silk

My remaining breaths

Hunger for no more air

 I know the break

Fragments were once

Each of us

An unopened puzzle set

Every cove and jutting spit

A universe of sea world

Held on the tides’ bosom 

Alone and complete

The mosaic of tumbled pebbles

Your entire life

So small, so smooth

On its way to the sand kingdom

We built our castle

 The High Road

The altitude is dizzying

Your peak is out of reach

The alpine ridge’s gravelly path

A fall’s just teaching niche

For grace springs from

Dark redemption’s depth

And loathing is left to languish

On valley’s bottom bed

Alas, it’s lone and plain

Traversing on that path

I clip wings again

To be the better half

 Guilt and Control

Carry these boulders on each arm

Drunkenly down the path

To the feet of the majestic oak

Where shelter and alms

You are desperately seeking from

Trampling over lichens and moss, a careless sacrifice 

Like a fool that you are, oblivious to their providence

Or worse, your unmerited good fortune

You reckon the stony weight

Is a marble temple payment

You think collecting pain that belongs to others

To clothe your cheating heart

Will be your amulet, your passing grade

Yet pretending, afraid and empty

She is beating blue bile instead of warm blood 

You are only cast to be counting the billions of beats 

Until deliverance is to be felled unceremoniously like

The shorn hair of a lion’s main,

A golden heap to the feet of the goddess

For Midas’s curse on you

Is Zoe herself betrayed

Unworthy 

The pot’s gratis

Is watering the basil 

The clay’s thirst quenched is

Only a happenstance

Of merit unwarranted

 Just Returns

“Only the closeted desire 

did not cry bitterly in the end”

She declared, as if I should 

Have remembered from a past life

A life, an inverted circle

Half drawn, its weak light sponged out

By memory’s intrepid night

Heavy,  a weighted blanket

On details, feelings, bodies and minds alike

The dark side of the moon waxing

In the dark, which is not exactly

The absence of light,

mining for that everlasting pain’s morphine

“The eggs, share with me”, he said

“If I do, she whispered, they will be hatched velociraptors, coming after you”

The circle was birthed 

With just returns

WRATH

The alchemy of action thwarted
A period, at the end of struggle’s endless paragraph
The final note of waves phubbing
This sustained scarcity’s offspring

Necessity of destruction’s fuel
And metamorphosis’s wing alike

Current emotion on one’s tiny universe 

Impotent Goliath 

David’s mighty rock

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices





“ Part of the radical work of justice is that we have to imagine something that no one has ever taught us before, but what’s fascinating is people do that all the time. They do it in science. They do it in literature. They do it in art.”

Disquietude

The sounds softened, disappearing
From the arena of daily hustle
The feeding schedule of the world’s
Images, goodies for endless gorging
Disrupted
The wilderness of fear and surrender
Had to be negotiated
Step by step

Spring progressed unbothered by
The demise of our naïveté
Greening the grey woods
As forever more
While caught limp
Between its barbed teeth
We wished death to be a lie
So we wouldn’t get lost
In the silence of time