a shifting line.

It’s a shifting line, a curvature of the spine,

no matter how I set my card houses anew

I never seem to be able to keep them

from setting alight in my hands..

Curling cinders, and

a fallen angel.

Restless, I walk like a tin soldier,

with a rusting key

along the bare back of the Moon,

endlessly captivated by her pallid face,

through shivering tree leaves

and distances renewed.

I drew the endless cities,

burned black and dragging

their sunken bellies, like visual enigmas

d

r

o

p

p

i

n

g

their dormant realities,

carnivorous dream-states.

A soft lined room.

A bell jar inverted.

A missing whisper.

And..

Where do these creatures exist

if not through out the knots I’ve created?

A bashful, heavy handed gesture,

a brick laid without prior discretion.

Winking steadily over the horizon,

the lights only cause me to question

as every moment I am left sifting

through the unsteady strings

hung from the ceiling, fraying.

Unrolled from the carpet, from the back alley,

from the gutter, from the lighthouse.

My hands flew to the glittering promises

that healing is somehow going to mend this..

That waiting, waiting, waiting...

with uncertainty by the door, dressed in dregs

of tea leaves laid out

whilst prophecy and redemption

snigger, bleeding me dry like thorns.

I run to catch up

to this tugging string.

I keep two halves in my home, at least.

An empty birdcage within my ribs.

There are shards of glass that reflect the faces,

their teeth sunk into my soft flesh

in even precision.

A box rattles in the dust clad corner -

the contents have become uneasy.

I wander in and out and around,

feigning fiction like a spectre,

wiping my kabuki mask with sand paper.

(A might so strong it can level ground,

a tongue made of the finest silver.

A skin welded shut as iron maiden,

a drama built entombed by sleeping ocean.)

What is this empty room I’ve built,

that houses ghosts, but cannot reach the living?

Where is the garden when all left are stones,

yet in the silence the words are buried.

We chewed through the darkened night,

the ink trailing from our mouths, and down our backs,

churning particles of sharpened words..

As the steps fell before us,

ringing, ringing with misgivings

and behind the hands of loss - a choice made twice.

There is absurdity, hanging his coat.

He lets me think as Time walks by,

tapping coins together like an echo of sympathy

and shifting a smile through empty windows.

I climb the fence, I walk through woods

I search the trees and tap the runes.

The magnets fade, the Moon sinks low..

and all left me are tell tale songs

And how,

they wash over me

straying inwards like stray cats

chasing shadows in the night.

It all just washes

over and moves on

like vigilant messengers,

born of cracked feather and flaws,

to keep me enthralled.

Keep my eyes open and ears tuned

as thought, if we could only hear their voices

dejected and forlorn in anticipation

but,

I just kept kicking up the dirt,

locked in to one spot like paralysis

held my very bones at bay,

while the music faded, while the silhouettes

and the trials began, in order

to end.

Then when we fall again to sleep

like a symphony of gigantic sinking ships

the thoughts unravel from my sleeves

like heavy, engulfing, translucent sheets..

The mind is emptied, a moment is unfolded

,a shifting trail of surrendered dreams..

And we lay our terrors to the ground

and bury them without a sound.

x