Invasion

This bleak

This rotten starry black

exploding beneath my closed eyelids

A dance of death; a brush with heaven

One more visit with the Other Side.

I can't sleep.

Fingers roll deeply into make-up greased grooves

and can barely make out the old typography of my face

I rise

with touseled hair tied into knots

from endless hours battling with my pillow

Dead-bone moon peeps into my window.

I close the shade;

I don't much like the invasion.

A Recurring Dream

It's dark, like night. A house, with a long kitchen bar just by the back door and a garage. A leisurely cigarette, whiling away, standing to look at the back yard that extends into black. The only light is the new moon. Little cats mew at my feet and twist their bodies into serpentine shapes around my ankles. I bend to stroke their silky coats: black ones. Marbelized patterns. Then they startle and dart off around the side of the house.

I glance up and see a shadow. A big one, slow at first as it comes from the distant nothing but clearer as it comes to me.

Panic turns the blood in my veins to ice.

I drop my cigarette half smoked and back into the door which has been ajar the whole the time. I swing the door shut. The door passes through the jam, though it's never done that before. On the outside it swings and hits the brick of the house.

I'm always surprised at this.

I am left face to face with this cat. A big black cat. Not black. Spotted. Then it dawns on me:

It's a mountain lion.

Terrified, I grab the faulty door's knob and try again. The doorjam may as well be air. Jolted with adrenaline, I attempt to quell my shaking long enough to match the door to the jam, to throw the lock in place to secure the door. The door is suspended in air. The house has disappeared.

The mountain lion moves in.

I wake.

Dead Scrolls

You are the only one that makes me feel truly naked, I
burn and bleed and wink at these dead scrolls that
lie across my hood, strapped on with sinew twine.

Deepest truths are often hidden beneath pale lips and
not until something's said are they finally known
like black beetles; shining carapaces vibrating with pulse.

A life that you helped take, waste and wring out to dry
shriveled and whitened, bleached and boned,
gutted and hung
like crustacean pearls on a guitar string.

Mange.

The sickening, sleazy slime of decades past
a life I eliminated from my daily agenda
Journey back to where the book was open
and everything was up in the air

A beating of dark wings
outstretched beyond the landscape of my ideal imagination
a bile so villainous
I can’t abide to carry the concept of it existing
longer than a nanosecond.

The case was closed;
said-chest of poisonous deceit
drowned in the depths of self preservation
The page was turned;
the candle extinguished
to protect the eyes of the innocent.

Still, I pause here
on this dusty trail of what I’ve been doing
to look behind me and see
it’s followed me home
like a stray dog with mange.

Undead, unbarred.
Sunken red eyes to demonstrate
A hundred pounds of wasted skin
Mottled judgment or askew irony...

Fate is not always what we make it.