Trying to understand

  why you marked up your body

  —I stared at the ink

 

The memory of your open promise

  still inside of me

   —unfulfilled

 

Retracing that promised memory

  with new symbols

   —stained forever

 

You colored in the empty spaces

  I was unable

   —or unwilling to see

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

 

I lifted you into my heart

But one arm was missing

As single wing and one handed

I carried you inside

All the while, you pointing at

My lost absent limb…

You told me you’d love me

If I could find that one misplaced part

The part that would then

Make me whole

I looked into tomorrow

And searched through the past

But my arm had reached out

For something beyond my ability to see

I could still feel the numbing sensation

Of pain

Where the arm had previously

Been attached

The vibration of loss

Now prosthetic for all that was severed

You pitied my deformity as I hid

My eyes

As best I could with only one hand

Telling me the fault was mine

For always reaching beyond what I

Could know or see…

And with your final stroke of malice

You left me further disabled

Climbing back outside a wish I knew

Was never to be mine…

When you left you found the old world

Different than the one you thought you knew

A desert of frozen stone with a black sky now

Surrounded the stillness of your abandoned love…

As you hesitated to turn around and

Reenter my world

The one that just a moment ago you had

Admonished and left for good

A lone arm reached out and closed the door

Behind you

Leaving you abandoned in a sea of loneliness

And despair

  —to love no more

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

Dedicated To Lisa Wynn in the next AOP.

 

    

Thoughts ignite,

  and words burn

 

As everything considered

  —turns to ash

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

Dropping its bomb,

  always missing the mark

 

 Your echo implodes,

  a sound hollow and dark

 

Answers unquestioned,

  all bombast enflamed

 

Drifting abandoned

  —in silence unclaimed

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

You tell me…

 “the structure gives strength to my writing”

 

I tell you…

“it’s nothing but crutches in waiting”

 

You tell me…

  “the order brings a beginning and end”

 

I tell you…

  “the sequence does feign and pretend”

 

You tell me…

  “the form—the most important of things”

 

I tell you…

  “the truth rides on Seraphim’s wings”

 

You show me…

  the prison you’ve build with your pen

 

I show you…

  a cartridge empty—no ink from within

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

 

You can listen with hope,

  or listen in pain

 

But listen you shall,

  as my words will explain…

 

“You were left in the shadows,

  neither empty nor full

 

“With a decision impending,

  a test of your will

 

“Your choice will define,

  what you praise or deny

 

“Will you now come together,

  in the truth or a lie

 

“Do you carry on blindly,

  or reach for beyond

 

“What your comfort will dictate,

  as your courage responds

 

“One path ends in darkness,

  one reaches for light

 

“Your tracks through the umbra,

   that fear leaves in blight

 

“It’s down to that moment,

  last chance to define

 

“Will your search end enlightened

   —or in twilight behind”

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

 

 

The universe orders

  the questions and answers

 

Eternity caught

  —within their difference

 

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

It’s harder to lie in verse or a poem,

  than it is with dialog or prose

 

It’s harder to bend the truth over a feeling,

 than around what you or someone else knows

 

It’s harder to feign an eruption of light,

  or the isolation of being alone in the dark

 

It’s harder to mislead with words formed in your soul,

  than with tomes that were written to outsmart

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: August, 2016)

As the music inflates,

  like a David Bowie video

 

My voice is set free

  for the words to diffuse

 

Floating above the unwritten verse

   like steam escaping

 

And drifting free as the

  pressure expands

 

It cries out the release of a

  lyric unsung

 

Channeling a melody

  —neither future nor past

 

  (Villanova Pennsylvania: July, 2016)

 

 

What’s left of my remembrance,

  now all that stokes the fire

 

What embered in the springtime,

  the winter does expire

 

To douse not once but then again,

  that spark which set me free

 

My wood left burnt with forest bare

  —and darkness all I see

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: July, 2016)