041: No name

Black pearls washed ashore,

runes carved in driftwood

from an island without trees,

pins on a map, epicenter

of a mythical nowhere,

solar tears whence the sky

drinks the sea dry.

Words about words,

tempt to paint a lash

in Mayan blue, no rhyme,

a wake so dark, a fall so deep,

awake or dreaming

lost in fog, a reality,

in questions of time spent.

Spitting out cupfulls of bile,

black lung haunted by fear,

look into the rising sun,

beyond shivering green,

a wordless answer lurks

where white whales spurt

and the moon drowns.

040: 3 days

Within the halls of seeping time,

in the glare of your footsteps,

tonight, on such a sacred night,

my soliloquy resonates so barren;

there's no answer form these tender bricks,

the veins of my temple are sewn shut.

Silver serves the red, to open the skin

of a butterfly wing, of a crimson king,

of an animal fighting its shadow

for the last splinter of sanity.

The night decays, yet you fail to see

how the fireplace caresses still

a newborn ember from yesterday,

petrified to a fractured rhythm;

I don't fear the winter, freeze my tears black,

for you may destroy this temple,

but it will be raised anew,

with every dusk and every dawn,

until the moon drowns away

in silence.

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.

036: Dissolution of the unborn

From beyond ramparts of time

and columns of rue,

they sing and call to their mother,

echoes storming the firmament of bone,

their song to my pain, the words I never said,

winter flesh, siamese grief.

Beneath the roots of my castles,

their frail bodies linger,

bugs traced on a windshield,

bellowing deep, till I fall asleep,

build my temple of dreams

stone by stone, preciously,

a religion of images iced, sanctified.

My children, stretch your watery wings,

for the abyss knows your names

the way I never will.

I'd force the arms and stress the springs back

to return to the source, the starry womb,

for every word unsaid,

every glance unreached,

every line not crossed,

every name not written.

In golden sand, the imprint of your mother's face,

her unbearable beauty

still burns like an open wound.

035: My only carriage

Tonight the asphalt seems to cushion my steps

as I'm trailed by a procession of bards,

weightless and smooth,

bearing fiddles like feathers,

poised for a touch.

Tonight my lagging limbs feel lighter,

animated to a thought,

a nimble leprechaun laughing crystalline,

carefree below observant chords

in the moonlight glaze.

Tonight I can hear firewood crackling

in my abode of loneliness;

and those present in faint corners mean no harm,

for we're still young, we still have time

and our song still glides above the waves.