i.

Skin dies when you’re dead,
but this tattoo’s ink doesn’t.

More ‘Me’ than me ever since,
ever since buried

memory’s itch scratched
to surface again its prick’s

insatiable message, that
this exists: a place

your craft inhabits
will become magical once

you do magic there. Never
forget what quest pits

esoterrorcists
twisted in an effusive

relationship, threatening
excess affection,

against their mission’s
completion: wanting to let

laughter which swallows the dark
thwart as it did us

the them men become
when this desperate enough.

Don’t be meta, be mega.
Make of something lost

an art, terrible
as gods! Go beyond love gone.

In a garden of scars, an
urn full of dusk asks:

‘I do ponder what
these spirits make of me, made

as we are of them?’ Fired clay
falling, thundered sun,

shoots down hard some dark
nobody whose rising shame

                    ii.

shot somebody you loved. Slain
in the midst of fear’s

vanquishing anguish
purpled with perplexity

only an eclipsed kiss bruised
flesh comprehends. Give

me anything but
hope, life a gift of a length

of rope thrown out far until
a shard of some bard’s

poem in a throat
chokes from a Stoic all strength

left. Hanging on to pronounce
to full shout this hound’s

final howl, those who
hunt hearts pull to theirs those ones

another’s pulling away
pulled apart. Knowing

their Dante, how these
suicide trees who only

speak if bleeding taunt me with
silence circling my

honesty seven
times before crying as I

cut from them an opening.
Gate-walking through wounds

grief dressed in ruined
nightclothes, now soiled beds plow ground.

Echoes of whispered names cloud
with vapour, speak with

mist exhaled breath chill
tendrils cursive, that answer

unquestioned: ‘You know only
what you see through me.’