If I recall correctly i think the interior lights of Los Angeles buses are lower at this time of night. I don't remember being able to see my reflection quite so well while peering onto Sunset Boulevard's sidewalks. Making out the difference now is just as difficult as trying to distinguish pedestrians faces. Everytime I look out onto the Colorado as we glide over the Congress bridge I just think of my murky hometown aqueduct. its beds decorated by the brazen artisans of its counterculture, bespeckled with colorful language in decipherable letters. The city's superficiality always challenged by the quiet subtle uprising of its resistors.

j.

It's so terribly astonishing
how your every inch remains to me
(or at least the "you" you used to be),
when the more obvious idiosyncrasies
of lovers lost more recently
were forgotten almost immediately,

I can't recall my last love's fingers,
but yours? A perfect image.
I can't recall my last love's kiss,
although yours was more timid.
I can't relive my last love's sighs,
but yours, still, how they sear!
An ever-widening distance between us lies,
yet somehow you still feel near.

Is it that that distance, always our curséd blessing,
why I still find myself my love confessing?

or is there truth in the adage that made us wander-
absence truly makes the heart grow fonder?

I'll seek not, nor deliver an apology,
but how did you ever become so much a part of me?

For Dame Death, on Her Birthday.

(June 17, 2011)

Not the first, and not the last-
O, gilded glimmering burst of dying ember
frightfully flitting, to light my path-
thus I'll burn once more just to remember.
A truer friend, you might've been,
but love me more? A one could never.
To see the Life within my dying face,
and to wed the two of me together.
The beauty of it was the deadliest.
The dual-sided dopaminergic Deliverance
always fueled the never-would-be-sated
fiery seat of my ambivalence.
Most dolorous of doting fervour
trembling to trespass the Gates of night
before we'd find our dew-kissed cheeks
tough and taut before dawn's wretched light.

But now that my psychadelic Swirling Falls have passed,
and the summers have singed the weeds that grew,
I've resolved to tenderness over what transpired,
and denounced the pains I thought I knew.

Now that our grimoire is shut and sealed,
tossed into the icy Styx our rueful tome,
I wish I could have conceived our sentience;
I wish we'll all still find our home;

I wish that I may still find pardon,
though I'll hold out a little longer;
that you were more than a Cross'd Star to light my way;
and that I could have been a little stronger.

runes

The ditties I write are but eulogies
Of things I once loved now long gone
Engraved by hardened men's hands Upon cold jagged granite,
Runes strewn across perfect green manicured lawns.

Marigold daisies like your eyes pushed to sight
As corpses of dreams regenerate the soilIn their tectonic right.

I suppose this to be the thing
You always understood,
So as Orpheus I'll trek
Through fire- and ice-wood,
Valleys of shadow-sea-
To bring you back with me
Where the light beings frolic
In the wide-spectrum-band -
For mustn't Death and Tragedy
Walk always hand-in-hand?

I heard a story you might like,
It goes as such:

My fiddle player fell [to his death] into a well.
To retrieve him I sought to speak with Lucifer,
And thus traversed again the rings of hell -

The Goblins bade me turn away, laughed in my face
At my plight and did my fate foretell-
And Jareth, so cocky and keen once he was seen,
Gave me a task when pledged I my soul to sell;
He spake, "Travel the depths to the Hall of Mirrors,
And bring back only the perfect shard."
And I suppose his jealousy now arose,
Thusly towards me his heart grew quite hard.
Then, when he saw all I'd done to retrieve the glass,
He scoffed at my completed task, and asked,
"Haven't you figured out yet, dear,
What you've truly chosen to sell?
See the True Love that you seek in that mirror-piece."
And, of course, all I could see was myself.
"Little time," quoth he, "on that green earth have you now,
So if you'd like to hear the fiddle played,You'd better soon learn how."

He then gave me my heart's violin and bow,
And I returned to the light burdened to know
That never would I behold again
My handsome holy grail of men.

My lovely Mademoiselle de Mort,
You know I love you dearly,
But must you kill all mortal men I love
To help me see myself more clearly?