039: Hours passed in exile

Again and again, faces dance,

music helps, still condemns,

visible husk gets banned, inject

the serum of empty days, cutting blade,

the soft fabric of todays, elastic

against a hungry vortex,

a faint eye, library of pain on paper,

selfcollapsed beneath its weight,

a volcanic cenotaph stands

where the crowning jewel

should be.

Waiting hours, days and seasons,

waiting for the snow to flee,

for gold to enter the cathode sky,

to wish upon an icy star

for an earthly paradise,

sweating to hold handfuls of utopia

to build a structure

that renders tomorrow benign,

pointless within the absence

of answers, a celebration

to the fall of the word.

[title borrowed from Dark Tranquillity's eponymous song]

038: For the second time

Last night I watched again

my own stake

in slow motion blaze

from the bottomless bog,

then drifting further

on the polished onyx,

away from clouds of flesh,

albatross air cleans the sweat.

Using crash logs

as ocean maps

to the chapterhouse of failures,

collections in agony

and the guillotine blade drenched

in azure, from the veins

of the invisible,

a saline aftertaste.

I scrawled with incisors

and lifeblood from the cavity

in the heart of everything,

the precision of creation,

ironcast cybernetic

like glacier lakes,

with nitrogen rage

beneath the mantle.

037: Life in the shallows

In the shallows, writhing,

in the shade of concrete reefs,

fish colonies migrate

in clockwork cycles,

dead hand precision

beneath uncaring gaze,

salty, liquid today,

the dance of anemones reflects

the demons' tar,

the dark side of mirrors.

Tomorrow, the dawn of triumph

will take us all away

into the blue,

yet the flame's still unconsummed

the epic of my pitch,

unwritten.

Fish swirl around in steel tornadoes,

but I cannot give birth

to so needed new words

for a cardiac language.

Pearl fishers from the other side

observe seconds

of these fleeting lives,

another fold

in the same veil;

and the doused embers are voiceless

as lightning sparks run

through Ranvier nodes,

on highways of grey,

never far enough.

Words fail again

to redeem the mute,

before the reach of dreams,

the thrust of exile, when gills unbreathe,

so I'll paint the blue

with burning oil

and elect silence

as my new tongue;

as long as these fibers pump and grind

I know I'll never die.