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
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
