I fumble around my spice cabinet for the vanilla I know I bought instead, I find a box                                      of used     dusty                                      birthday candles. the ones that are your favorite color. I think about the milk chocolate ganache, dripping from the peanut butter flavored cake I made you and the red candle…

   in a cityscape a wailing train whistle echoesoff the buildings and concrete    it resembles barge horn soundings  that bounce off the banks    the islands   the river inlets    the water              during the dark of night     through the stillness comes   the lonely moan of each    the sounds evoke a need to escape    to flee the agony of misspent time   wrong love   lost loves   regrets turned…

what it means to be: a good son model fucking minority split between my parent’s whims & my own—I am 27-years-old & still have no absolution. No single decision of free form thought across scattering mind must be a baby must’ve just woken up from a nap must’ve cried but…

Hidden behind the curtains, they’re waiting for me.Expectantly and fearful at the same time.For a reason. Bots have been exploited   for sex    for warfor anything they could think ofsince the beginning of the cyborg era. We have passed under different phases, before our Keepers could decide if we had a soul or we were just…

is cracked glass Picasso striated grove —skin branches, singed romances, flame buried in bone chip snow, glycerine.  Globe revealing glistening cemetery. His youth, a sunken mausoleum mystery; angles become mangled. Face is wasting, cubed. Happens in a wink.You think you are confused — staircase  mistake of candlelight?  Dim castle direas host, Adonis, promise, flickering to ghost. Last crackle,…

for Harry & Bess Houdini On a day of no importance: dark of winter, far from seances and anniversaries, at last he gave her message through a man who wouldn’t take a reward: answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell // a code tapped out in syllables, lettersacross the stage for his encore performed between there…

Dollhouse will dim when he commands goodnight.Six chandeliers, nine candelabrum cede enchanted light.  All die but pillar, slight,  beside your bed, brick candle wax free bleedseight hours in a magician’s stead.  He leaveshis proxy flame, perpetual night light,a circle cipher in a canopythat maps good girl geography.  Respitered curtains, bridal lace bedspread, a wetembroidered pillow…

one by one they enter the front room, remove their shoes and take up in sofas and armchairs, they shake off the shale, clinker and mudstone in their teeth. Rowen. Sexburga. Boudica busy exploding out of her territory by farting over the biscuits, her hare snoring loudly in the folds…

From beneath a single word it came, Expanding from that burning, brightest thought. It ever grows and yet remains the same, Never to be felt and never caught. Slip it through an hourglass with some sand, Watch it on a sundial, or on a wall. Hear it coming forwards with…