Of Infatuations Past

How you shrouded me in doldrums.
Heartstrings riotously off-key,
fabricating amor, masquerading sincerity.

Half-felt fancies of time-devoured innocence:
trails of truths quartered, honesty unknowable.
Sputtering sparks of affection
precariously swaying
kissing the cusp of adulthood’s cold introspect.

You taught me more about loss than
a million tragic romances ever could.
Two souls enraptured and disinterested
—volatility incarnate—
pitiful flings,
sentenced to simmer infinitely
on the afterburner of indifference.

Battered and broken,
an ego run the gauntlet,
—affection indefinitely castled—
faith destroyed long enough
to be convincing.

Yet hope arrived,
blurring past misfortune into
distant cardiac scars—
the calligraphy of your love
scribing promise anew.

Equations

Try half as much
as you complain,
you’ll double the success
of your last failure.

Effort is desire divided,
multiplied by perseverance;
a line of best fit
in convoluted algorithims.

A hypothesis is but an answer unproved,
a solider untested.
The war begins on your command,
waiting on blood-shed experience.

Paumanok Descending

Silence is the underworld
rippling through a heart,
the jumpstart at day’s break—
a foghorn cacophony
an earthy drone.

Of Weights and Constrictions.
Anvils three-tiered
seducing fathoms:
sunken Hope plays Faith’s counter-weight—
an inveterate buoyancy existentially tolled.

The 51st star
amidst fiery plasma:
a happenstance afterthought
a glacial memorandum.

Where phantoms breed lust
through Gatsby dreams.
Capital Kings
domineering seas,
gilding coasts
In the shadow of
Primordial City.

Weaned on carcinogens
of immovable strata
nourished by dystopian seeds.

A harvested inheritance
despoiled by opulence.
Multiformity left to breed ravenously
on bedrock beds
bled of vitality.

A screw counter-sunk
to a corroded core,
magnetically coaxed
to return root-ward.
Paumanok
you sink towards reclamation,
ushered along by loadstone
indiscretions.

Starting out from you
Is a requisite door—
a beleaguered monument diminishing,
capsizing amidst its illustrious throes.

Sink we together
Tethered
Expiring towards a watery throne?

The Waning Opiate

Happiness
A drug depleting ?
Pacemaker’s metronome droning:
Whirring wearily
In the uncanny matrix of beats.

Every road
In forever loamy wood
Diverges heretical:
A precipice gift
Of endless meander.

Unbidden at best:
A false ebullience
Promulgating deliverance.
Sovereign to the last
Idealistic edicts

Passed
Cajoled
Coerced

Numbness befits
Myopic transcendence.

Stargazing

Struggle and settle,
We all do.
Search and search,
For little joys
For stolen happiness
For armor against
Reality’s sobering taint.

We all do,
Fumble and fall.
Melancholia wants company,
Needs time to conquer
Needs you to suffer
Needs weakness to appeal
To permanently cripple.

Overcome and succeed,
We all do.
Relish the pain,
It emboldens
It empowers
It reinforces
How excruciating victory can be.