Jillayne

Nobody ever drinks to forget. Just like nobody ever sleeps to remember.

The lines on your face that extend into the night. Into time. Your laugh that ripples and breaks away from your mouth like a flock of startled morningbirds. The way you pull your hair away from your face, drawing open the curtains to the only day that matters.

There is a sunshine in you that permeates night and cloud and the deepest of earnt sleep. The slow and burning away of layer'd dreams like an Autumnal pyre as you stir me from reality and into a waking dream.

There is a spice in your words; exotic and acutely familiar. But strange. Like hand-me-down childhood wares.

You long for peculiar but fascinating things, evidenced by your nocturnal mutterings underbreath. Things I will never give you; things not of this world to give.

You smell of days and nights. Familiar now and still like distant memories I long to revisit. All at once a melange of your youth as mine, and sand, and oranges, and gin, and unscented wax pulled from hidden away drawers. An impossible viscera of vestigial emotion.

You question life in perpetuity. Even in your avowals there is an ever present ring of doubt and wont of resolve.

There are dragons in your eyes and lairs beneath, such secreted scales all gold and green. Your coffers aglow in the absence of light.

Your lobster trapp'd bottle of inside-out ardor and skinned-to-the-bone veil of delicate duress.

And you escape all reason.

Where Love Grows

And so it was how I felt about you
That dark, that mysterious reaching into the night
On the tip of a breath so faint it may bare no life
And I stood at once where we all had been that Summer now done and away
And silent
And radiant
And endlessly my veins pumping histr'y into a Martian sea still too vast to escape
And as often as I would ask where Love goes when it dies
There is only light that flickers and fades and sings of children we will never know
I remember words built of a different tongue, and upon stranger tides than face me now
And somewhere now in time and space and arms not mine to know
There is all the wondrous heat of a dying star spilling life into your sweet and sunken faraway eyes
I will work and climb and pray and eat and dream and find you when we are all stars again
And we alone are the suns that we now bend to
And we have long forgotten such warmth once cast at all

Honesty part I

She's a tired old town, and like an old dog struggling to nap in spite of its master's company, she doesn't take well to strangers, now or ever. She takes even less to strangers wanting a pat.

Traffic is bad. Well, was bad. Traffic implies movement in at least one direction. There's something stalling in considering the swell of industry here so many years ago that managed to turn the only dirt road into town a throbbing artery of steel and ambition. It didn't take long for that one road to become four. The town took less than a year to grow from a hopeful opportunity at the end of a long dusty line into a burgeoning nexus of unchecked proliferation. And it grew. And grew. And grew. Eventually as tall as it was wide. In fact where its landbound borders were halted only by the surrounding canyons and mountains in every eventual direction, the sky presented no such halting limit. To be sure, the very idea of entropy seemed as lofty as each new skyscraper gradually pricking its needle into the impossible blue above. This was real progress. There was as much breath and life and blood coursing through this city as any body organic. An endless hive of ignitious activity and dividing cells spawning bigger and brighter explorations of recombinant youth.

There was little attention to those historically stifling concerns of process, and security, and the paying of the piper when the piper came to town. A select few of us saw it a little earlier than the rest, but still too late for all the good it did us only to watch helplessly as our rapidly expanding universe grew predictably into a tumour, over which most of us became too heartbroken to stay and watch drain away into history again.

But stay some of us did. We watched as she continued to feed on the arrogant dream chasers that poured into town, oblivious to the signs of decay already sweeping out from its wounded heart like a ruinous coagulation of too much too soon. We watched as she fed, but was too tired to chew and too hungry to spit them out. It became exhausting, watching that horrible but elegantly designed extinction of dreams on such a massive scale. And before we knew it, before we could warn the others, it took us too. Our years of youth and promise swept away into the same dust and rock that had birthed us.

And then he came. Just as alone and oblivious and wide-eyed as all the rest. I can say confidently that there was not a single thing different about him than we had seen roll through here a thousand times before all of these last twenty-odd years. Not a single thing. Except for what he had brought with him.

And I don't think even he knew it at the time.

O Fortune

Alone together
We toss and turn
Swimming in the naked and the dead
A million echoes
One by one
Strung together like busted pearls
She forgives me my dreams
In their boundless descent
Of my unspoken whispers and unwoken fete
A ruinous dissolve of ev'ning light
Struck pale in the dying of the night
A sweet sickly warmth
Rapturous in its burnt almond finish
Were I to merely regret
The time I could not keep
The flesh that pulls and strains
At a heart not mine to keep
She is the etch
The imprint in my day
The ghost of all things present
And lost
Wine
And lips
And contours I will never touch
And sleep
Without rest

Peace

Alone in this cold and windy frontier
Atop this pine-built nest of crows
She can see as far into the approaching night
As mine own heart can throw
All the future of Man ahead and crashing
Like the unbent dreams of a wistful child
Atop the bridled shoulders of a quieted father at the edge of life
This forest of salt and air and gull-cried oblivion
An eternity away from the womb
This ocean of worldly placenta
Time like an arrow; day like a bow
Broken by the hide of an oft-hunted beast
She dreams of the light
Of the warm red respite
Come only by the shores of the East.