Phoenix Queen

You will not
Get me. You won't.
Don't try, don't think it, don't
Breathe
It or anything more will not happen because
I am the Phoenix Queen.

You burn me, I rise. Again
and again, and
Again.
You burn.
I rise.
Until I burn myself, and then,
Peace.

Downside up

Downside up:
New order of the day,
And of the life
That slays the upside
Down; down
Where we are frozen and 
Dismayed.

Down, where we've forgotten
To obey 
The anti-rules of day-to-day
Existence.

If we could seize 
What we should
In this up-ended, down-righted
Way,
We could allay
All of the fears, persistent.

That which so
Unlawfully does claim to bar us
Every day
From self-forgiveness
Is, in fact, the scandaled way
We all
Should be.

Otherwise

Where, where does the dreaming go
When when it hits reality
It turns to dust and pains me so
Though I have known, always, I
Have but fooled myself with foolish
Optimistic thoughts, although
I have, in kind,  no right to think them.

Oh, the luxury of double life
Of those who make mine up, you know;
And yet, there they do reside, the ones I'd
Harbored trust in, foolishly
Resigned myself to thinking there was
More to this.

The fact in tow, in dragging, labored
Consequence is that
I have no right to know,
Or think I know,
Or to expect a thing at all,
And it's my fault
To have believed it otherwise.

Hands down

I place it in your hands,
All of it,
Into your able, midweight hands and
Step back frightened,
And finally,
Finally, I breathe for a moment
If not just for the thought of it
Until I can't breathe again,
Which is how I am
Normally.

I give it to you, if only the idea of you
And not the truth,
But I give it up, 
Into those hands that are there
And not there,
Yet I have no choice but to trust
They are there because
Honestly, my inadvertently coveted dear,

There is nothing else.
Please be there
Because I'm mid-fall
And need someone with
Strong hands
To both bear and benefit from 
The inevitable descent
And all.

An untoward light

“This is the office of the Town Muse,” she said

And while her fingers touched the knob,

They bled as she opened the door

To the world beyond

That door that kept what led

To Possibility and to Wanting, and to

Darkness untoward, and to sublime light at once.

She fed on that dark light

And her view spread into the ways she’d thought

Her life would lead, but it hadn’t,

Yet – inconspicuously –

It had. 

And still, she had

Regained what once had fled

From her (thought-to-be) huge grasp,

Once thought to be remarkable,

Yet now, it fed

And failed on what she thought

Could be

But, instead, had spread 

Beyond 

Her darkest 
And lightest
Dream.

Reality check

I have had recurring dreams for thirty-three-odd years
That jolt me from my sleep,
Too wound up for tears, but still, disoriented,
I have found myself alone.

Lately, though those dreams have kept
On keeping time with habit,
There is yet a presence, unexpected
That has caught me, upon waking,
With a gentle breath that dulls
The fear and now, I know, but do not trust
The knowing that
I'm not
Alone.

But yet, in these said dreams, there was
A piece that kept reminding me that I
Was not made for a normal life,
Nor fated for a long one. So,
It seems the dream has finally begun to creep
Into reality.

Ironically, though sure, I guard the toss and turn
As arduously as my nature does prescribe,
I find the crazy nature of my life
Requires, eventually, the strange reversal
Of this fate and forces me --
Despite my clear and non-demanding 
Stance that comes of years of never getting 
What I'd wanted or had hoped for 
(Please, believe, without regret) --
To stop.

Pause, and breathe, and look around
Me and take stock of what it is I have.
To most, most physically, that would be 
Nothing.
But, to me, it is the only thing
I need.
A heart, integrity,
The strength to keep on going and
The moment. Nothing else is real
And nothing else will ever be.

It all comes down to love.

The morbid case

There is a small place
In space and time
When despite myself I find myself
Able to take in the
View
Where I don't matter,
Nor do the things that do
Or don't
Take precedence in my mind
Because all there is 
Is the moment,
Beautiful,
True,
And that reminds me why I breathe
In and out
Each day
Despite myself
And seek more
Than what I've resolved
To be the so-called morbid case.

Do not smell the Roses

There are no sidewalks in Pleasantville
To attract the riffraff or those
Who would stop to smell
The Roses that the residents have worked
So hard to pay their gardeners
To plant for them,
Whose hands are in the raw, sweet earth, 
While their hands are in the air
And their heads are in the numbers that abstractly reflect
The money they must abstractly reflect on endlessly
While depriving themselves of the pleasures
Of the earth --
And of the Rose --
To maintain.

Immaculate re-conception

And in a twist of synchronicity
That now, behind my ever-strengthened
Front of cynicism, betrays me
At all wanton times,
Was re-presented to me the concept
Of the immaculate conception.

Immaculate? Perhaps. Conceived
In a way that most would deign
To think belies 
The very counternature of itself,
But still,
The way I want things to be,
In a way I was frightened to think
Could continue to present itself to be,
Therein lies
The paradox of the thing.

Today, despite 
The fear, despite the 
Unknown, despite the un-
Knowingness, I was shown an
Alternate way to be
With all the doubt
And all the (un)free-natured argument
Previously undone, and un-decreed,
Given a glimpse of a sign and of the sun
That I cannot help but feel
Reinforces what I want us to be.

The first words of a book I've wanted to write,
But have rejected -- based on
The inability to see the point,
Or the worth, read to 
Me in soft tones, growled in essence --
Renewed my faith
(As little as it may be, but
Clings to me nonetheless as one
Has once observed while
In a tunnel)
Proved to me
That doubt is fickle and transitory.

So now, with newfaith,
I plow into a
Newday; The 
New Day
I feared but bring the conception of,
Immaculate 
Because you've borne it too.
Into the possibility that
None of this is ever my end; 
Not even the end,
But my beginning,
As it should be.

Down, down, down

It's official. I no longer
Call my life my own, nor
Do I claim to understand
Anything at all.

Time moves slow
And faster than I can hold on
To, further and further
Merging, imperceptibly, into my
Subconscious, unconscious reality and out of
My fragile, weakened hands.

There it was. 
The ocean, vast
And large and cool before me, and me
Trying to stare it down,
To see it, but I couldn't see it
And the waves took over
As I floated above myself
Trying to hold fast onto time as
It evaded me the harder I held, fast
Floating above the
Swirling, turbulent mass
Of liquid dream as I saw it pull us
Down,
Down, 
Down, 
Unable to stop,
Unable to breathe,
And BAM.

Morning.
What happened? Who am I?
Who were we?
Where are we?
In the unforgiving, relentless sea
That has washed away
What I thought I knew,
What I thought I knew to be time passing,
What I though was real.
To and far, far away
From me.