Enshrined

I fiddle the six strings
and they resonate in your echoes.
I breathe in the lull of nicotine
and trace your veins in midair.
I touch a nerve with a bleeding pen
it’s frozen at my fingertips.
I count your wrinkles, kiss your calluses
and I melt, I melt into emptiness
I paint my skies in dark afterthoughts
and your hues fill my palette again.
I see, I dive, I crave, I dream
only to have you seep in through my seams.
I find what I’ve lost, I hold the missing piece
only to bury it in you once more.
I stretch across an empty bed
warm in your thoughts, cold in your absence
I toss a coin to let things transpire
but it’s me that falls again, head over heels.
I caress your hair, I try to pen your ink
and instead wrap myself around your being.
I’ve built you a shrine within my crux
Out beyond the reach of everything else.

.

Your name,
it is wedged somewhere in the deep
in a crack between my ribs
where the arteries meet.
If I say it, I cannot breathe.
And then it rises, swiftly,
from trembling vocal chords
doing a loop-the-loop within,
caressing the throat
circumventing its course
through my tongue
and in a heart-stopping instant,
emerges the crowning jewel of phonetics
a beautiful whirl
a resounding spell
sheer perfection in three syllables
nine letters wide,
an inflection garbled in pride.
For the life of me,
I can't imagine what is so special
except for the fact that it is
your name.

Verbal

Standing.

at the edge of a precipice

on the threshold of insanity

a footing that's as good as none.

Hanging.

my words on a silver string

surpassing the sheen of pearls

like a noose around my neck.

Reading.

the poetry on your fingertips

while my ink stains the pages

darker than ever before.

Drinking.

from the cup of possibilities

drunk on daydreams

draining the dregs of being.

Metaphors in the morning

A cup of tea at the crack of dawn.

A crack so loud, it wakes them all.

A miserable dove on a quest to nest.

A holy cow on a sabbatical.

Paisley clouds on a solar mission

play with the spots on idiot’s face.

Clinging to the awning, swinging in the breeze

rusty cobwebs mourn the old spider

Light and shade, bloom and rot, picture and prose,
it all comes and goes.

Lullaby bye

There are ants in my pants
snakes in my shoes
tumbleweed on the windshield
and demons on the roof.
It is black,
so very black
a roomful of invisible nudes
and dying embers,
rocket scientists
fading into the stars.
There are shards of glass
and shamen in my brain
nails in my coffin
and peace within.

A lucid dream

One idle evening
you looked into my eyes
and it began to rain.

The foliage glistened
while I danced alone
under an azure sky
and your arresting gaze.
Soon enough you joined me
-I don’t recall when -
we moved in hazy circles
 in a downpour of desire.

In a while I’d noticed it -
a pearl clung to your ear
and you smiled your effervescent smile
as I stole it with my lips.

The vanishing act

You were here,

a phantom in the moonlight.

The music stops, and you’re gone,

a familiar unsung melody.

I play the same song, over and over,

loop to loop, end to end,

just so you’ll stay.

Life’s cinema, paused, muted,

stuck within its reels

for those moments that you’re here.

Holding on to chimaera

so you don’t disappear.

But you vanish like a dream

almost like a phantom limb

and your smoke rings linger awhile.

Come home

Come home with me,
away to my moonlit island.
Let the storm wash you ashore
on to swamps of chimera
in ripples, of amaranthine visions
where we are one.

Come home with me
watch the lone tree from my windowpane
that gathers lightening shards in its boughs,
the only one on the expanse
that the tempest chose to descend
like your voice upon my ears tonight:
elegies from your throat
that often shatter my being
into a million stars at eventide.

Taste the wafture of my cold moaning wind
for it brings the Rain;
Heaven will descend
in cold orgasmic drops
on a waiting earth, so fragrant
The way your voice
with its trebles and opulence
rains on me infinite renderings.

Come home with me
see my slice of sky,
painted in your hues.
listen to the murmurs
of mango leaves and firefly wings.
Tread on my soil with naked feet
and dance to silence's overtures.

Touch me not, yet;
let us wallow in the stillness
and hold each other in gazes that overrun
while the universe unfolds
before our eyes.

and when you bid me farewell
I shall not weep
For I have your whispered lullabies
to listen to all night.
I always had you -
your voice, your thoughts,
your presence
In the breeze,
the swaying trees,
the wings of the heron
in every wave from the sea,
and every breath I breathed.

Picture: Marilyn Bouchard

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Written on the night of 29 April 2013 for Mikael Akerfeldt, the man himself.
In the hope that one day he might read it.

The Temptress

Voices by the river

and I walk down her trebles
Naked pebbles dream away
Ages eroded on her shore
sediments of lore
anticipating a footfall, lay
Oh, the slightest quiver in her slumber.

Kissed by mist
embanked by silence
sleeping streams of turbulence
whispered songs of a yearning

floating butterfly wings
fragments of her soul,
contained,
sedimented, in her solitude.

Daunting in her beauty
terrible in her torrent,
the Temptress
dances with her secrets deep
Touched by none,
but the Phantom of Time.

Her name was Dementia

Footsteps of silence
placid steps drowned in mire
not a breath, nor a sigh;
deep she descents
down the forest of Oblivion.
Her feet beseech
the fallen leaves
for trinkets lost -
and never found.

Canopies of distrust
mocks her sky beyond
remnants of the lambent
trickle down the undergrowth.

Stab the light
and it bleeds;
slithering beneath
are moonlit serpents
devouring scattered thoughts.

Death stood alone
a little further
in a travelling cloak
woven of shadow;
with open arms
he drew her close,
tenderness he breathed
with a kiss planted deep
and he wrought her soul unto his own.

The seed of love.

She asked for a gift that would be forever.
He gave her, not diamonds, nor lovebites lingering
but a pot of Earth - with a seed buried within.


"Feed it warm care, and drops of passion
a whispered caress and good clean air
Bloom it would, into valleys of flowers,
an orchard where children would play,
where by night, you and me while making love
shall dream of  esoteric shores
and fall asleep on the forest floor 
under the ardent moon aglow."




She placed it where it would gather all the sunshine. 

silhouettes

Lurid, the lamenting sky
sepia sweeps her subterfuge
prominent in their absense, colours
evade my easel, anew
drenched in perpetual hues of you
spilling over the palette
I paint my own mirage
silhouettes in your resemblance
amidst the blinking bokeh,
an obscuring foliage,
and shadows
to fill the void.

Before the endless dive..

Crooked edges.
Shattered glass and spilled wine.
a twisted smile and a whispered taunt.
Ahh. Guess what?
I'm insane, and you divine.
precarious dreams and loosened pants.
like a snake in the grass.
Take your heart out for a walk
on a leash, lest it turns back.
Take your heart out for a ride
a ride to the farthest horizon.
(while there's still time.)
To myself, I am a danger. ooh.
and guess what I could do to you.

till death do us part

In the rain
of clouded thought
oozing doubt
unsustained distraught
A dance of past allegories,
Rusted dimensions, of truth
they cut deeper,
inch by inch
naked glass, on naked feet

The undergrowth reveals.

With harrowed pain
Blinds drawn
And second thoughts
that transcended the first,
this pavilion was built.
It was torn down
And rebuilt
a thousand times over
to accommodate the music
of mad fatal love,
and words that triumphed
over silence.

Over to tomorrow
when fate plays its cards
We have but one to play
till the curtain call.

We bled till we renewed
disagreed till we evolved.
Scars stay to remind
But in faith we are baptized
And we remain,
for the faith is in love
till death do us part.

The Brute's Visceral

Strangled songs,
sing-alongs,
muted gasps,
to tarry on... on and on.
Flows the river, motionless
a breath, an interlude
til his words resonate a roar
and shatters,
dead lips that echo
dead eyes that reflect..
shimmering beneath the surface.

Haunted, his labyrinth
of morbid cries and screams
crushed in his palm,
they disintegrate,
to tingling rhythmic shards.

Untouched, yet entwined
demonised from the inside
embellished, his earthly woes
stem from an arsenic womb

mercy sheathed an embryo
to shield the devil's child
a discourse, from an intercourse
outplayed her ringing sighs
rue,
she did leave a scar
in her son, cursed, demarcated
no rebuke spurned his need
to vengeance, evermore..

dancing to his call
still waters turn to unquiet
submerging lullabies
unsung through his strife

he surges over the undercurrent
wrath seeping through
borne, of powdered bone
strewn over the purview.