April

I ponder the beauty and the despair

The promise and the probate of reckoning

Neutrality will not work anymore

Slumber is naught

In the inevitable march of the sun

I am the hapless gardener of weeds

My determination a cloud of dandelion puff

Scattered, resistant to Lethe 

A Persephone eating my pomegranate seeds

 Half Life

The moment of fusion

When atoms split

Is the fatal ambiguity

Of April

The dark wood spent by now

Garners one last flint to spark

A beginning once more

Unconscious mimicry

Of a creator God,

That otherness straddling

Time and existence

Unfolds the petals

Of the other half,

The secret of death

 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