Folded Iron Cranes

Across a universe, I converse with you, versed in every curse I’ve built and sculpted from a purse in a person built in shaded made and dated in a faded gynasium, cough until I’m faded like jaded  titanium finger. Nails knitted, fitted into a stadium, crossed and broken bones that fit into a uranium structure, baby dear, just tell me you’re the conductor. I’ll fit into the knitting like a knotted adbuctor, stealing all every knot you’ve sewn, I find that I’m stuck here. Feeling every aching bone and bind up your cuffs here. Ask me my name and I’ll offer a soliloquey, what you ask of me, answers constructed in the back of me. Answers that you’d extract from me, building to atrophy, starting every line in symbols, signed off and passed to me, but if you need to bleed to finally figure out a conclusion, I concede, indeed, there are a million lies left in illusion, they said this life’s an illusion where there lies the conclusion that illusion is a lie we tell to fix up the news room.

Circled numbers on a calender remind me to brace myself. The scent of sweating bodies bouncing miles away, blood rushing, and my head throbs. There are countless titles written in sharpie over my skin that wash away in time and then slip below, ink stains between ventricles that I don’t see, but offer such a subtle poison at each flexing of my hand. There are so many names writ in iron and tie about my wrists like friendship bracelets or handcuffs. A few eyes here reach out to touch the floor, to touch the wall, to touch a newly-dyed sheet and a mind locks down into the lingering words of a sleeping girl and her breathing phone. After a few quiet days bogged down in tireless busy work and pens and pencils alike sharing space about knuckles, there are allowed these few moments to think. When in one mind, it is impossible to find the other. Either case, all I wish for is to be let go and dive teeth first to the ocean floor, gnaw on the weathered stones below and illuminate the seas like food coloring illuminates a glass of water. I grew unfamiliar without hearing wanton soliloquies and knowing the difference between one in a million and one of a million. Days come when I seldom know which place I fall. Ever words fail me then. Voices glide from me as sunlight off glaciers. And I, cold as arctic winter, alone, move slow without aim, knowing only that soon enough I will either melt away into the liquid oblivion or crash into another and crumble and be broken. A mother sobbed to see her son broken, to see her son melting. A mother sobbed to forget her son falling. A girl kissed to forget her lover faltering. Another bled to forget a lover lying. Poured together one part tear, two parts blood, and four parts gentle kisses on the occasion of a circled number. Cut into three. Bake on 214 until wasted. Serve until empty. This place in formula failure offers up a decision that perhaps the south will lead be southward. Perhaps home would lead me home. Warm butterflies beneath irises that suggest an idle mind. How I wish I were but home again. Home. Where I could be found in the red dye they use to paint a box of longing chocolates.

There were leather rings on his eyes.

Warm and worn leather rings that held still like

contact lenses

and they breathed in for him to stand

atop ambiguously colored windswept hill tops.

They bathed in draconian sunlight,

wetting lips

and fostering fervent stories for a child

December.

And bouncing light from frozen earth

leapt to find place on a road of tablature,

to beat soft the drum

to call on and anon

his bard whose hands were like wheat,

soft as his flour and

dry as his land.

His bard smiled and kissed

the necks of women and

made such caramel language that he

was forgiven of his efforts

by town-pacing folk.

Upon this bard rode his brother love,

holding still leather rings.

As he,

leather son of Abel,

saw the bardic youth of Cain,

he grew faith in his harvests of quiet

wisdom, trusting that to be his brother’s keeper

was to maintain faith in that

which holds

a light within a lantern.

Ever still, Leather he knew

that steel held still above his brow

and soon he would wear the piercing fine.

This bardic prince would be a knot

about his hair that dangles freely

like moss in forests.

This prince was sweet,

well-intentioned and

gifted with caramel words.

This tender and leather son would breathe

through hide handkerchiefs that the wind would not

displace itself.

There were leather rings on his eyes.

Warmed by the light of the sun and

worn by a prince of script.

As clothes are super-imposed on skin and skin is super-imposed on flesh, I find my reality super-imposed on the ether. I feel soft, cool waves of truth touching my toes on the beach. I taste it in the crosswinds. We line up dirt roads and boulevards and highways to match the spirit walkways underneath, but they’re hard to find. But sometimes we see them. If for just a moment, you see the raw road ahead of you. In misty lines or spider silk, the trail is blazed ahead, but even then they fade in shrouding realities. Even then, though. Not all it lost. Follow blindly. Because you know where to go. I’ll meet you at the crosswinds, where we will be spun into ballets, spun into webs. We will find serenity when our walkways cross again. We trip over chasms in the ether, slide over ice. Distracted by what is fact and forgetting the honesty in fiction. We forget where the road goes. But I saw. I saw that silken road, ghostly path, that venous trail that leads to the crossroads of the crosswinds. Never lose faith. We swung about each other in a waltzing gravity, but it will be time before we collide. When two walkways collide. I’ll meet you there. Just hold on tight. Hold on.

 A letter to a lighthouse. A letter, written of sea salt soaked waters dried out and turned into a sliver, dipped in the color of your eyes to perform the bone-breaking ballet for you on page. This is a letter to a lighthouse, written by a sea sick child on a beach. He offered me up his words tied up in a conch shell where echos slide through and drip on tissues as I still think of him. His smile strung together universes and let every inch of beauty that ever could be slip in and slide down as rain drops slide down telephone wires. All together this wat’ry love poured into the shape of you. The shape of a lighthouse.

He bit his lip and dropped his blue plastic pail and shovel and looked up at the heavenly beams that breathed out from the peak of this tower. What he dreamt could be his tower. Wet sand clung to his feet and only grew heavier in each stride. Regrettably, by the time he reached the doorway, centuries of silt had broken his ankles and bleeding trails followed him. Sickly stories turning sand to glass in the shape of words. Sickly stories turning boys to dust. And this sickly child carried on. He broke down doors and tore up knuckles. Ran up stairways and cut up feet. This child was a living massacre and as he found the light, he only looked down to the see the lovely slaughter he’d done to his shape. So caught up in the heart-breaking pain of injury, he purged himself from the peak he’d worked so hard to find.

Seasons change and tides came and went. A child sat on the beach. He dreamt of the lighthouse. His body scarred but his eyes ever wishing upward. To again reach that peak, to kiss the light, and to know the peace of life. He let himself drown in his own sanguine sorrows and found life-support in an intravenous memory. “Someday,” he wishes. Someday.

A letter to a lighthouse. I dream of swirling lights that guide my way. Perhaps home, perhaps lost. I dream of earthquakes and heartaches and, my lighthouse, I dream of you. Be strong. I’ve sewn our memoirs to this chest that I might find my way back. I have nothing to ask, throat too choked up to speak. I’ve learned to live nocturnal to see your light each morning. Now only during day might I find rest.

I breathe you in like particles of shattered planets settling down here. Though the tides of time will try to wash away our castles, we will never forget what we built here. Albeit true, the sickly needles did kiss this skin spilled of these fingers, the ailment was never meant to come down like this. There are catacombs in my body that even now I am too fearful to close. And, yes, there are times when the city above collapses into the earthen trails and I find myself again buried, injured, screaming a melody that sounds awful similar to a voice I once heard through a telephone. But there is some solace here. Even as aches shoot through in over analyzing your tome of sorrow, I know that there are still verses to follow. Shrouded in a mist rolling in with the tides of time, my face may be blurred, but the clouds will clear and I will see that smile again. Look to me across the flames. This story never ends.

To think, you’re all it takes to ruin a day that’s supposed to be good. You said you were different and yet you opened up my chest like a museum. You’ve abused me worse than anyone else has… and that’s all it took.

I wish I had more to say.

To think,

this boy with tales a million swirling in his head

piling and thickening with each day

Yet each letter is lost there.

I hardly know what to say

hardly know what to feel.

These colorblind eyes have lost sight of white

and have sunken into darker shades of grey.

I can hardly look in a mirror without this image

reminding me of remembered gluttony.

So I’d split my skull to find the core inside

like an over-ripened fruit

to tear out the core and hope to find the illness.

What am I supposed to say, my sweet?

This child is rotted.

Could you see here  my leather split softly here stapled to my hands,

would you see the mind split sickly under wraps?

And answers here even will tell me otherwise.

Under the grace of God, or you,

a no-man’s angel found humanity

and in humanity found himself a worm.

So allow me here to build a tomb of blankets

and sleep until the harvest moon

where these time-raped fruits will be plucked from an eager chest

and offered down to the earth anew.

The harvest moon, where a single fuck given

is an ounce too much of humanity offered

and one gram too much vulnerability.

I had faith in you to live.

And even still plead you breathe.

Again and again finding your radiation trails in skylines.

Searching out your texts for answers.

Where is your fear for me.

If you ever wish to know,

it is a drying field.

No letters here will be your salvation.

Ask and you shall know whats become

of this boy.

If not.

Harvest moon, come soon.

Rusted skin shaved off over banquets, angel. I believe it’s time for you to understand. How sickness clings like leeches to my throat, drawing voices out and filling its scaled body with these concrete and equally raw-flesh words. You’ve forgotten why I split this skull in two, as there is a difference between what is right and what is ours. I finger picked veins until all my wiring came undone and the home I carved for you in my figure collapsed in on itself, becoming something of a womb in my tangled and knotted labyrinth of a chest. So, here is a my amassed fear of what you’ve done; acts in passionate vengeful anguish and reckless self-mutilating papier-mâché stories with them for me. Perhaps the stars in my thoughts have made me more helio-centric than in wounds past. Perhaps you’ve offered me enough emotional foreplay afar that I’ve seen where your story could lead. All in all I fear for you. And yet, there is nothing I can say. Your heartbeat for me is pacing gone and what right have I to ask for another pulse? I could offer no more monstrous smiles in good faith for I know I ruined one of the very few pleasant dreams for myself. I only wish I could know whether I am still held in passion or what his name could be. I have been running on empty for decades now and beginning to stall here, risking a mannequin’s life on a highway. Write me a story, sweet. And write it gentle. I need to know your honesty shied away from even yourself. I need to know, lest limbo find the best of me.

For a while I could tie together a portraiture with psychic lines between sequin stars. I could dip fingers in milky eyes and paint up a plan with arthritic knuckles cracking and reckless children laughing. I could swallow down ink-stained smiles and sleep sound. We found fire on the tips of tongues touching. These eyes shut quiet and lips touch gently for now. Perhaps, I, too tired, will but listen. Perhaps, I, too tired, will have never heard. Perhaps, these canals for your voice have been so filled in paint and other worldly pipe-dreams that I lost your song in the thick curdled juices, too long stagnated in my systems that surely they’re soon to burst, if they have not yet already, like cold pipes in Winter. The more I pour in this glass and take down—all of this double-spoken back-talk to my lady or God in waiting—the more I find myself drunk in regret and unforgiven pleas. ‘Tis strange how even now we bear the complications I found in binding. ‘Tis strange how my organs do subtly sing out in remembrance of your figure. What bodies do feel right and these do not. What singing does sing sights in songs I’ve sought and ringing rights that fight when kings have fought. Ill-spoken nectar angels I would cross once and again choose to forget my better thoughts. Ill-spoken nectar angels that wished me luck in painting a portraiture with elder fingers, but will remember not the names that bound them.