SEPTEMBER'S POSTSCRIPT
The amber calendar dissolves,
leaving September behind to
inherit the melancholic residue
of our ephemeral summer.
The equinox arrives, a quiet
guillotine of gold,
servering the incandescent
warmth we used to hold.
September recedes, leaving a
skeletal landscape behind,
and the calcified architecture of
a love designed
in the reckless crucible of July's
blinding blaze,
now reduced to the twilight of
these shortening days.
Your absence is a reminiscence
that deeply hyperventilates,
an unforgettable phantom that
never truly abates.
I am trapped in the
retrospection of your quiet
silhouette,
navigating the imperishable
cartography of my own regret.
Every fallen leaf is a
memorandum of what we
could not save,
a fragile, amber monument
above a silent, emotional grave.
I am paralyzed by this heavy,
internal compunction,
standing alone at our love's
abandoned junction.
The autumn wind whisper of a
bittersweet commemoration,
of a fleeting, brilliant spark lost
to sudden isolation.
September leaves behind the
frost of what will never be,
locking your ghost forever in
the vault of my memory.
Yes, I am frightened.
I am frightened of being frightened.
My unsound mind,
dwells among dark shadows quaffing silence,
where the quadriplegic dead beckon,
a sea spewing out skeletal remains
of ancient swimmers.
Sounds of calcified castanets haunt my dreams.
Accusatory cranial eyes stare at me
and bony fingers point in my direction.
My crimson blood turns blue.
Oh! The fear, the fright that one day
I too will become unfleshed like them.
The earth shakes, mimicking my weary bones,
And the ground is wet with tears left behind.
The cage of whiteness, locked tightly inside,
Upholds the heavy weight of every day's design.
Secrets and memories are ghosts we keep,
Bound tightly within the walls of the chest—
Forgiven, forgotten, or just cast aside,
The architecture of a heart aching for rest.
My steps falter on the unpaved ground,
Stumbling under the weight of a calcified spine.
Yet all this physical aching scarcely compares
To the quiet, structural cage of skeletal frame—
That has, until today,
Only answered to the marrow of your name.
Coral builds from bones
beneath blue light,
a quiet ledger
of vanished breath.
Polyps inherit
the calcified past,
layer on layer
of patient death.
Bright fish drift
through borrowed halls,
unaware of the cost below.
a living reef,
radiant, fragile,
the reef sings
in calcified breath,
an architecture of endings.
Look at me.
Am I truly a monster?
Have I finally grown into the skin of my tormentors?
Peer beneath the veil of my eyes and tell me you do not see
the demons nesting in the ruins of my mind,
governing my thoughts and dictating my every breath.
I harbor no desire to replicate the sins of those who shattered me,
nor to harvest the lives of others the way my own was so savagely reaped.
I am entirely unworthy of devotion; I seek no affection,
wishing only to bleed out whatever love I have left until I am empty.
Waste no tears on this calcified shell.
Bestow your grace upon those who can still be saved,
and never dare to seek a soul within my chest.
Do nothing for my sake.
Utterly abandon the notion of my redemption.
To love a monster is an act of absolute martyrdom -
you will only be ground into dust, piece by piece,
until nothing remains but the wreckage.
We are finite creations in an ever-expanding universe,
Kissed by the calcified stardust of epochs gone by.
Seized by trepidation and insecurities that stagger our growth,
Engrossed by a yearning to fit into societals manufactured boxes
Which consume creativity and individuality.
Incapacitated by force-fed paranoia,
Tormenting our artificially pristine panoramas with mangled wraiths —
Regurgitated pleasantries scribbled upon mass-produced pulp,
Courage stamped out by mass hysteria.
Revolving chains shackle dying hearts turning to stone;
Humanity hardens while heaven becomes further out of reach.
For every action has, even if unintentional, consequences.
We have silenced our own tongues,
Watched in desensitised horror as the world burns,
And now we stand frozen
As the earth cleanses itself of our parasitic invasion.
The Invisible Strings of Black Light
I sing my mute blizzard on the stiffened string of full void,
the shrill echo of silence gently undoes time's curtain for me,
like a luminescent howl from a transparent sarcophagus,
that aspirates my breath through the pores of an effervescent abyss,
cacophonic symphony of angels with wings of calcified plague,
conducted by white crows singing in psalms of evaporated matter,
adorned with the phosphorescent keyboards of the abyss-color,
that blinds with its radiant blackness any lucid non-seeing,
abstract paintings of crystallized tears in dried blood,
a hypnotic rodeo of petrified butterflies in arrested flight,
metaphysical courtesans of a sterilized and eternal amor,
king without crown in the kingdom without throne and without stern,
where love is an amnesia that remembers everything in forgetting,
and presence is no longer needed to always be living disappearance,
my sinusoidal trajectory through a crystal of solid fog,
that wove our eternity into an exploded second,
to the nectarous curses floating through your granite thoughts,
the mosaic of my solar nights with fate's luminous catastrophes!
If I tell you what you want to hear
Will you actually listen
Or silently cajole yourself
That you have converted another.
If I tell you things you do not want to hear
Will you dismiss them
Without giving them any thought
Deny them the possibility of truth
If I listen to what you tell me
And question the efficacy of its truth
Will you dismiss me as a fool
Or engage me in lively debate
Or have your values calcified
Been stilled by an arctic wind
Blowing cold across a frozen face
Unable to smile at its own contempt
My concrete dried beneath regret,
No footprints left just silhouettes.
I scream through porcelain but cracks don't form—
Just echos of a lifetime; body-worn
An engine heart with rusted gears
Still grinding through regretful years
I've calcified to the point where nothing grows;
A statue dried; yet it sank inside an undertow.
And the hearse did rehearse its path,
Though the skeleton held dearly
To his ground, smiling loud.
He was bare - needed a shroud,
With his straight bow, grinned severely.
For it seems, he’ll not move ever.
There’s his calcified stick figure,
Who’s not shamed in the least.
For on earth, his time’s increased.
Seems he’s stuck in mortis-rigor.
Washed adrift, unable to reach the floating shoreline,
Lost in a sea of bitter loneliness.
Saline-soaked clothes stick to weary bones.
You become just a mere mirage under the intensifying sun.
Parched lips quiver,
Yet no tears can escape splintering eyes.
Lungs burn with every stroke of exhausted arms.
How much longer can I keep myself afloat?
I haven’t slept in what feels like eons,
Yet I can’t be sure, as these endless days merge with delusional nights.
No longer can I hold onto the hope that your love will see me,
Save me from drowning in an unforgiving abyss.
Eventually, the suffering will become unbearable,
And my blistered skin will sink,
Whilst my body finds its watery grave within the Twilight Zone.
All because I failed to see that your heart was replaced with calcified sulfur so long ago.
(“A Moment of Grace aka The Empty Mirror”, 2024, original encaustic)
A Hollow Place
Sometimes it seems that who I am
Is nothing more than the dripping sediments
At the edges of a hollow cave
All the stalactites and stalagmites
Of a lifetime of experience
Calcified into a personality.
I may fool myself and even others sometime
With the wonders these shapes create
But in truth they are the mere dregs
Of all those formative years.
And what I’m really left with
When all the lights are out
And all the visitors gone
Is just the hollow place inside.
(11/24/24)
Candle wax drips calcified tears,
riptides of dreams burst boundaries;
Drops become circles never squares;
Out of the box locked in a freeze
with rough edges it aims to please;
There’s no hiding their benefit,
claws can rip apart arteries;
That’s the magick of a misfit.
It's only my heart.
Chipped away, calcified
fragments all over the place.
Coherence that's all.
The blue butterfly
a toy in the hands
of little Catie.
Always fluttering
touch and go
playing tag with spirits.
It's just my heart
a very brief second in passing.
One of my guides
wears chaps, boots and a hat,
riding a stick pony.
How did this happen to me?
He is not there for me,
He makes little Catie happy.
I'm grateful.
Don't judge a little girl playing
like she never has..
It looked like a bleached tongue
pulled from a mouth,
petrified and incapable
now of letting a word slide over
its calcified silence.
I picked it out of the wet sand
and held it in my hand.
It had little weight, smooth
on one side and pitted
on the other. A cuttlefish bone.
It was a marvel of engineering.
My fingers followed its shape,
took in its texture, the pleasurable
feel of its form. I lifted it to my nose
and smelt its salty, faintly fishy
odor, sea washed to a clean
unsullied smell. It had undergone
a change into something
beyond life, into an artifact of time.
I kept it cradled in my hands,
held it like a sacred relic.
I have seen them too
shrink wrapped in plastic bags
on the end of supermarket shelves,
a calcium supplement for birds
to be hung on a hook
inside of a cage.
They were selling for $2.50
or thereabouts.
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