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Why shouldn’t she help herself, after the way she’d been treated? She had been beaten and battered. Wrecked and ruined.

His fists brustled against his hips. Gently was a word he’d use to describe the way she looked at him. What a fucking pity, what a mess. Her eyes looked past him and into the world behind. The world outside. He knew this.

Her knees were bent on the floor. He was bent on making her get up. Slowly, she rose. First her upper body, then her hands. She reached for him. A step was taken towards her. Not his feet though.

Tears began to fall from his eyes as he grappled with the weight of his actions. His grip on her hands shifted hers to open them up. Rather than praying, she was pleading. Ready to accept anything else he’d give her.

Shame. Shameful. Shameless. He took a hand to trace her slight smile. It was meek and appeared when he dropped himself into her hands. He was around her now, his musk overpowering her strength and she let her hands fall on his back.

How could she smile? So fucking deplorable.

She rested herself on him.

“I… I understand.. You were upset- I get it! It’s okay- don’t cry..”

Whispering with her fawn-like docile voice, she closed herself away from what could be her escape.

But she felt bad. She didn’t know in what way. Whether she was sorrowful for him or for herself.

Perhaps it is best to appease the Dead.
Rotting headstones mark temples and beds
Made weak by time and fate,
But strong in a will to wait.

Asleep, these temples lie in silent peace,
Epitaphs refusing their faded voices cease.
Inscriptions of heroes and saints abound;
Though, are they true to original sound?

Too often do the living perjure the Dead
With remembrances now confused and bled
From a gushing wound called time –
Too large, too quick, the clocktower’s constant chime.

Perhaps we are frightened that honest epitaphs, conducive
In calling her “Absent” and him “Abusive,”
Should awaken the Dead to haunt us like ghosts
Enraged by justice – slithering, screaming spectral toasts.

Yes, perhaps it is best that the living
Appease the Dead – so “Beloved” it is, truth again relenting.
Permanent etchings now manifesting memories,
Marking fallen temples – lies as legacies.

Perhaps it happened because I was small
Fragile as a forgotten doll
Another ghost for an old collection
I was alone and scared
And I remember sleeping early that day
Feeling thin as melting ice
I wasn’t lost but tragically found
Woke up with dirt inside my mouth
I miss you mom
I miss you dad
I’m sorry I left too early
But I still kiss you good night when you let me
And to him
I wish the worst
To drown in guilt
Suffocate
I wish I knew why he took me
And why kept a token of my memory
To him
I wish the worst
Perhaps it happened because I was small

Fear hasn’t seized me yet
newness is burgeoning
forever is tonight
tomorrow is whatever we dream it will be
angels flap as I watch them take flight
up,
up,
up
I see them soar
they call out
asking me to join
I don’t want to leave you
you know that
but something,
something is pulling me up
so release my hand, my love
I’ll be gone come morning
I’m taking off
heading home
but I’ll see you next time around

look up in your despair and consume the sun
bright and blinding
that’s me, my darling
and it’s you, too
warmth, brilliance, strength
I don’t know where I’m going
you know that if I did, I would tell you
though maybe that would be cheating
so,
watch that morning sun rise
bathe in the tender glow
don’t fret when it sets
worry not, darling
for our eyes always adjust to the darkness

where the birds sing by day,
and owls hoot before light,
critters that crawl
summer-bound roaches and geckos,
and spring-fed ants, line up beside the kitchen window
or fly through the hole in the screen door.

There the cat plays and jumps,
Looking for baby squirrels,
While hiding from puppies and children.
(She’ll skedaddle in a second
When the bark and bray break through).

Who is the designer of the world’s most complex game?
One that decides why some must suffer
while others feast in millennia of wealth?
What creator crafts a system so “flawed”
To the human mind?

Yet the moon commands the ocean’s waves,
And who’s to say the droplets in our blood
aren’t guided by its pull?
Life is balanced to the tenth of a degree, yet

What rules govern humanity?

The only certainty we have is death—what a cruel game.
Are we our own grim reapers?
Sowing the seeds of our own demise?
Until our souls meet, shall we both find the answer?

The wind blows, rocking my boy
Swaying from the bough
Take the cloth to cleanse
Fill the basin, spilling out
Just a glance to see you
Watching the cradle fall

Little birds from their nests that fall
To ashes they become, dear boy
But you know this, don’t you?
One with the bough
Krampus demands sins out
Craving more than blood to cleanse

The innermost parts do lashes cleanse
Do righteous men rise when they fall?
From His throne He did not cry out
“Do not lay hands on this boy!”
Like His son on the bough
Though now God won’t take you

Did I fail you?
So eager to cleanse
The clock’s longest bough
But five to fall
My lovely, my boy
My soul pours out

I scream damned spot, out!
Though not availing you
How did I miss this boy?
Pleading Lord this burden do cleanse
No. Instead, I let him fall
Let him swing from the bough

Do I cut you from the bough?
Disrupt your way out
Save you from your fall
Lest Krampus take you
My touch too weak to cleanse
I cry out to the Lord save my boy

He cuts the bough, not for my boy
But out of greed he does cleanse
Our child’s fall. Though I am no mother for you…

There is, in the last of the words, a regal tininess,
amnesia sprouting crinoline wings

crouched by a flower called honesty, a tiny purple flower,
that lives near the rock anemone.

Right beside the forget-me-nots, and the pantheon
of the dwarf-iris wildly singing

the morning doves, hoo-hooing, as the moon
is ladled beneath a single breath of cloud.

And the wisteria, like the straight man in the coming starlight,
and pantomime of silent platonic odes,

something like moon flowers, cloistered in day
and glistening, open like lovers’ lips before night.

The tide before it retreats into the vastness of an angry blue
where a jealous goddess creates love

in the genocide of all of human inaudibility,
spreading like thunder in the pluming tail of the bell heather.

And just now in this deft song of suffering,
a young red sapling begins to bend, like a holiness

choirs of rainbows, a petal chant in the mind
that seeks the end of itself, in this garden of names.

Bare as the living mannequin, whose clothes fall perfectly,
picturesque on the sacred ground, moulted there,

the illustration of what we are not, in the lithograph
of the hoop skirts, that ring in the tongue.

Of the early spring catalogue, scratching of stars
and the clockmaker’s verse, that naked, ticks away

like our very own heart, as another day turns
into a moment ago, in the fashion plate of all of time.

“Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” 1604 by Caravaggio

I catch you in the gallery but you won’t meet my eyes
— a regular Holden Caufield. You’re reclined on your crimson and slouch
like a teen in the principal’s office. John, I’ve heard your blood ties to divinity,
your prophecies and myths, but here you sit with little more than your staff and furs.
Have you grown thin on honey and locusts? Is it a thrill to be wild
and swaddle yourself in darkness?

John, do you know you are amputated and bisected in chiaroscuro?
You are a Cheshire cat, features peering from a blank sheet with the eyes
emerging last. It took me a while but I see now that wilderness
suits you even as it swallows you. John, you bow and crouch
like a wounded child. You cling bashfully to your furs
as if they can tell you something you can’t divine.

John I see through you, through all your divinities,
your brooding and your baptisms. You turn from light like the dark
side of a moon — framed in empty space, moored only by your furs.
There’s no beauty in gauntness. Do you see yourself in smoke? Your eyes
are stone underbellies where salamanders dream. You slouch
casually on your velvet sofa that is blood-ridden mountains: such finery for wilderness.

You are more a realist than I could have imagined, hair wild
and features washed out in the camera flash. It seems to me that your divinity
is evidenced now only by your
framing spotlight; otherwise,
you are a lone traveler slouching
on a bus, or a beam of light knocking around the shadowed
caverns of a pinball machine. John, the critics see you by your shades; your eyes
are dustbowls. You must have paid handsomely for those furs.

Despite your protests you are a beacon amidst these firs —
your skin is reflective tape in headlights, gaudy against the wilderness.
And yet, you are no messiah, more boy than prophet. Your eyes
are unsettled grudges, the absence of something forgotten that was once divine,
the slots and vacancies at the back of a darkly
lit closet. You grumble and slouch,

play at nonchalance, always the actor to your own suffering. I draw your slouched
posture in regalia but halos have grown gauche so we leave only the furs
and the cloak, your edges archipelagos punctuating a penumbral
sea. I’m not sure we’ll ever see the end of this wilderness
or if they’ll remember us in metaphors. What does it mean to be divine?
Take my hand. The myths I will tell of you will be of the hurt in your eyes.

John, I start to think that your furs are fake, and that your divinities
are cereal box reprints. It’s not your fault. You turn, slouch back to your wilderness
like a beast towards Bethlehem, patron saint always of darkened eyes

Whole moments of this day,
You will not be able to replay.
You will stray away,
Not able to convey.

Please help me succeed,
Don’t want to repeat.
The success I need,
I am going to plead.

This persons pathetic,
They’re so hectic.
You can’t respect it,
You just reject it.

Now that person is harsh,
Morals are far apart.
These two have no heart,
I don’t know where to start.

This person is the personality police,
All of these people you want to police.
The words hit them really deep,
All of you can’t handle real heat.

No peace with all of you guys,
Their anger is on the rise.
They have too much pride,
They hurt their souls on this. Right?

All of these people going at each other,
They want to just beat each other.
Conflict with everybody,
Uncertainty is everybody.