The devil says he’s sorry,
but it doesn’t mean a thing,
you offered him an apple
for a feather from his wing.
A fire burns inside his heart,
a flame that grows and grows,
burning for euphoria
is all he really knows.
You wore the feather in your hat,
your fingers black with soot,
you danced because he asked you to,
a shoe on every foot.
Diamonds glitter in your hair,
you wear your virtue well,
you’re every inch a zipper girl,
as far as I can tell.
Buttons fumble under thumbs,
they just won’t come undone,
the stillness of another day in limbo
has begun.
Love is not the fearless thing
my mother said it was,
it resurrects the constant moon,
as love so often does.
It’s six a.m. in New Orleans,
we stagger home to bed,
our lives are stitched together with
a tangling of thread.
The bed lay at the bottom of
a dark abandoned well,
I rolled your name across my tongue,
preemptively, and fell.
The pillow’s stuffed with ancient dreams,
how easily they die,
if you’re the dreamer’s memory,
then who the hell am I?
Dreams take time to decompose,
there’s more to life than sleep,
the well of all eternity
is lonely, dark and deep.
I love your black cosmology,
the starlight in your eye,
rainbows hang like angels in
a pyrotechnic sky.
Anyone can disconnect,
I did it every day,
I pulled the plug and watched the fractal image
fade away.
Anything can be undone
but dreams you can’t defend,
find the crooked ladder to the bottom,
and descend.
I dropped a pin and waited for
the echo of the sound,
your milky bones abandoned
on the unforgiving ground.
We sheltered from the fire
in the shadow of his wing,
completely covered, head to toe,
though vanity is king.
The shroud that wrapped around us was
a clammy uniform,
the pleasant conversation was
the calm before the storm.
We shed our skins and went to Paris,
waiting to receive,
there are no upper limits to
the things we won’t believe.
The man who stole the microphone
complained incessantly,
he seems completely innocent of sanity
to me.
Power is contagious,
it’s the pain we can’t endure,
the man who brought us fire
thinks the devil’s heart is pure.
Death removed his velvet gloves,
a specter at the feast,
panic is contagious
in the belly of the beast.
He says the word ‘forgettable’,
he wipes the future clean,
love is just the shadow of
the silence in between.
The firewalker talks about
the beauty and the light,
his body glows like neon
in the bowels of the night.
I followed in the footsteps of his ghost,
on high alert,
he looks a bit like Elvis in a pink
Hawaiian shirt.
I paid for my vacation with
a pocketful of change,
it’s helpful to remember that
the human heart is strange.
There is no end to gravity,
your heart’s a little worn,
the child of eternity
remembers being born.
The world spins in the black abyss,
it’s what we bargained for,
I don’t know how the memory of dust
could haunt me more.
Our dreams are psychedelic,
so we never dream alone,
the darkness is the only thing
the world has ever known.
I watched as something burning fell
across the crimson sky,
there’s more to satan’s version of events,
than meets the eye.
It left a kind of mushroom cloud of
interstellar dust,
the remnants of its prophecy
embedded in the crust.
We chart its cold trajectory,
as passion often does,
as ever, it will be the frozen moon
it always was.
As for me, I’m not a fool,
I’ve seen the way you dance,
you waltz right past me every time,
without a second glance.
You dream about eternity
inside your padded cell,
serpent, with your shrouded heart in pain,
I know you well.
The floors have doors that lead to hell,
I’m bruised from falling in,
speak, and our entanglement of sorrow
will begin.
Kiss the child innocent,
and leave her in her bed,
hover over every steeple,
luminous and red.
The sky is grey with tattered clouds,
I’m starting the descent,
is this the way the demon with his wings of fire
went?
Angels plant their random seeds
on bare unfurrowed ground,
I dreamt I was your heart’s desire,
gloriously crowned.
The light was made to guide the world
from darkness into flame,
strike the match and set the world on fire
in my name.
I have no other weapon than
the one that dulls the blade,
I bleed because you tell me to,
but I am not afraid.
mt forest
January 31 and March 19 ‘17
#477