thoughts flow through the air
like drifts of grey ash from a burning tower,
scorching across white sheets
like cigarette burns.
to some, words sound foreign and strange—
no rhyme or reason—
but not to those who listen
in tongues.
for sooth
of my Muse’s vanity,
compulsion rules.
mad scribblings abound.
i disturb the peace of blank pages
with the moving pictures of my silent film,
fettering time
before it dissolves like sugar in the rain. 
How clever I think I am,
pulling words from the air
like rabbits from top hats
to set them ablaze,
across pages
and ravage their pristine virginity.
I bleed.
I sweat.
I shed tears upon reams
so you can feel what I can
no longer.
Here I am
ground down to the gristle,
my passions splayed out–
spread-eagle–
for all to see,
to get…or not.
So, what is this thunder
that tears through my chest
and rattles the brain,
still?
The steely determination of memory—
its greedy clutch—
keeps my cup half-full
with unpotable waters.
Emotions—
all but chemicals—
a drop too much,
a drop too little—
rage and fade along with the dying of the day.
Recollections,
the moving pictures
of my silent film,
continue to linger
like birthdays
and the need to breathe,
hungry for hints of light
that pour in from doors left ajar,
for recognition
by the lonely eyes
of morning and evening skies.
The gravity of my verse is diminished
by blood-letting shades
that haunt the spaces in between
ecstatic bodies of black ink.
But for the raging
of my muse’s vanity
these scribblings bring solace
and succor to my soul,
as I suckle at the raw teats
of my poetry,
Longing
for an empty cup.
A white bolt from above
rips
through the clouds before our eyes—
an epiphany—
showering cuts upon the kitchen table,
releasing bad blood,
testing our guile
and gristle.
I look, upwards, at blue sky through bare branches,
the dewy wet of cool, green grass on my back,
clinging,
sinking,
pulling me further away from this place.
I long for the stillness of being
found only in the shedding of this meat that plants me here.
Oh, to touch those spaces in-between.
To graze my lips upon that azure skin.
O, opiate kiss,
Like a stone, skipping across limpid pools.
let me caress that face with my lips and sink into your oblivion.
Your everything!
But I am bound,
here,
by bare branches,
between me and a beckoning sky.
Biting my lip to taste blood,
I long to smear red what God has painted blue.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
—Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921)
/////Logos Literature 