i.

Self-creation is fundamental to art,
but translating transgression is the hard part.
Crippling realities are competing with
my li(f)e’s self-imposed fictions, sighs dusted with
charcoal perishing in proportion to my

                    ii.

muses’ superfluous beauty. When I found
the religion my parents lost, I felt it
my duty to abandon any faith in
unity and, already bred in a wrecked
home, embrace this individuality,

                    iii.

foregoing shame, for once believing in me,
instead, knowing fully vanity’s conceit
is that no one else will ever find me as
interesting as I find my Self, truly.
A fabulist and fantasist on a fool’s

                    iv.

circuitous journey through this wilderness,
my cargo ship of baggage sits now in dry-
dock, where, in between drowning in evenings of
extravagant excess and miserable
daybreaks of spiritual unrest, we sort

                    v.

that shit out peace-by-piece. In my artistry
it dawns on me that, though not understood so
easily, everything I write is done
so honestly, but is it honesty? You
tell me. Say it or sing it, whether or not

                    vi.

you believe it. Sit on it like a secret
or ride this copper mane, musking up its breath
until morning, moaning until this mouth tastes
the way its tongue feels: like a sundown soundtrack
only we, my dear reader, can ever hear.

                    vii.

Something of Plath in my Lazarean beard
comes up like a tell-tale heart from under my
carpet of chest hair, wearing well its beatings’
bandages, rising again with a vampire’s
fiery appetite for eating men like air.