9.

 

The zephyr came, blew the breeze into the flame,

the searing halo I cannot put out – it knows me,

how my wrist is held by the hands of petit mal dames

playing tricks, sprinkling embers on my ear and nape

The wind and the fire crown made me a wicker man

made from sticks of an origin that, had I known existed,

I would have thrown into the sea, along with my body,

but the omens never help – they always want a sacrifice

 

10.

 

Too small, the pills fall away under the stove,

My stomach numb, it gnaws and churns

But all I feel are my knees scraping on the tiles,

My arm reaching – clean, dirty, depending on

How my skin reacts, or if my arm will light on fire

I sense them and let the panic subside

They are in my hands and I am safe for now

The slow damage is eating away at me already

The pills are on my desk now – they are already gone

 

 

 

11.

 

An instruction manual –

First, let me go, you know

my struggle and need

no obstacle for the writhing

Second, when I am turned

to the side, hope to god

I remember I can make it

through the next few hours

Third, my heart is a knot

tightening from the absence –

I will loosen it, do not worry,

She will come eventually

 

 

 

 

 

12.

 

There is no water here and I am still drowning,

sound of voices muffled in and out by the wake

I am passing through choppy consciousness

treading thoughts, barely, lying and floating

words between polite dinner and brief liquor

My lungs are filled with panic and swimming

to sure smiles and standing, what my legs

refuse to do, are meters away from rest

 

 

13.

 

I fell on the subway on route to a party

chatting with a woman against a pole

The aura formed the swell in my head,

my body is surfing on the turns of the train

The idea of my location is irrelevant now,

the direction is a hope I do not pass out

She keeps talking, I stammer, I-

-I-

-I-

Wipe out

Here comes the EMTs

 

14.

 

I sank and felt the mind blast

Maybe this would be the last,

Or not, who knows – the tank

Is empty, where I think, grow

fantasies and the average shrinks

 

This crash of faulty brain staggers,

A battle of flash fires on grey matter,

Home to silent pains while I assault the

Absence, until I tire, barely breathing

And then, seething, return to the fray

 

15.

My sick head spills out the boundless ambitions in my dreams

face down, profound and abstract, a thousand years a second

shattered when I am awakened by your attacks. I need sleep,

take in Nyx’s breath and whirl in the night’s missing pieces.

 

I am not alone in the bed – the absence, the complexity

make a trio of nightmares and verges of night terrors

so predictable, I want to snuff them with all my pillows

but they leave, as always, lying to me they won’t come back.

 

I want my dreams unending, and to this day miss its haze.