a chocolate heart smeared
the bleached marriage spoils,
spraying sunlit masks over morning sheets,
as his rage cracked her drifting, glass horizons

She could have forgiven a frantic,
hot-headed brother,
his wet feathered head, foggy, lost, in singing clouds,
but not this ghost
who brought her inflamed waters
begrudging her his shoulders.

He'd fallen from a broken moon,
a low star, burning out, consuming itself,
it sunk beneath his mad regrets,
cooling and silencing their green songs
in molten encrustment

His cement heart under
starving fingers, she could not soften,
while for twenty years, she denied
the child within her that he'd become
was going to be still born.
~

Desperately trying to save him,
she pushed him out,
waterlogged death.

Offering only salt blossoms
and beautiful chains,
he refused to live or die
so he froze in limbo for the time

He'd fallen too far,
spitting bitter moments,
his poison grace vanishing her
night skies
in the flood of his needs, then

liberated the moon and her stars back
into their naturally tilting orbits

but this he didn't consider, blinded
by his images of
belonging and owning

the sky she worshiped
and to which he only felt
entitled, vanishing
wife from bed maid
his shadow sink slowly
dissolving espresso
back to his source:
New York,
out walking lost job,
limp cock, all this hateful

wife, mother, even the world
alone amongst angels
who kept him, allowed sleep,
dreaming of canoes
and conversations before she
broke
him

abandoned as she'd been
abandoned,
he fed on tears, memory of
her juices declined and feared,
her salt and flow that he took
for grime, or some kind of potion.
~

He never expected to emerge
Wind ordering him to move
his brain raced against reason,
cried "No" and no one came.

Left but not alone,
unknown,imbibing darkness
to see again
he could no longer ignore
his panicking now
was not for her but
for fresh air.

The chill demanded him to marry
the monster he'd become
and misnamed as "that woman"
yet to taste of the lightness within
this darkness,
one small mouthful at a time.

For paralyzed years he saw nothing,
only coughing up words
meant to slay her rejection,
"always" and "never" and "should"….

But time was his not to end....

Thawing, he emerged one day
from his suffocating tunnel,
bedraggled and naked, hollowed out belly,
dried bat shit on his shoulder,
construction muscles now torn and
leggings ripped off, in order
to learn to dine with frogs
at the lips of a more naked stream, he sat
~

Now he warms with frogs
his hands search meaning in sparrow red wings,
the talons bent around his fingers,

Now he tries to straighten back
to soaring her bent legs,
closed against his furry chest,
bird droppings on his back
reading the news now
in the swift tilting clouds.

He listens
at the prancing
stream's watchful voice,
for the borken stained glass
crushed guarantees of greatness,
and settles instead for its cooing.