Pointless Hope

Clauses left hanging after the comma,
as if cut off-- left to ellipsis...
The remnants of emotions translated into words
are gone-- you have none,
you do not exist.

Awoken from a Dream

Now I pull the candle flame closer to me,
as warm as a crowded-around hearth.
My brother plays his guitar erratically,
and the brownish-yellow lamplight
within the hopeful night.

...I awake, and my peculiar
nightmare draws to a close.
My teeth no longer chatter against the cold,
lessened to slight chill, and the spring cherry-blossoms.

The sky is real, an indigo color, and there is a whole world waiting underneath of it.
I lift my eyes up to it, a little dizzy, but whole.

Sydney Carton

The jackal has shed his skin--
or skinned himself.

His spirit, always dwindling,
now shudders, finally alive, in the brisk of the morning--
blossoming from the headless corpse.

The golden horizon
gleams in his hindsight
a thin line of beauty, of divinity;
separating the ground from the sky.

The sunrise approaches-- O!--
and he goes.

She will smile, someday, far away from this time.
And her hesitant sunshine will engulf the Earth,
left in the hands of his mirror image.

Animals in Afternoon

My fennec fox friend told me,
off-resentment in her voice,
"Life sucks and then you die."
And my brother the fanged bear said,

"You don't know what
suffering is."

And the transparent and wide-eyed canine thing
--a girl who resides in a bright, false haze--
--skinny and odd, yet lingering, with head tilted--
told me it was all
"unnecessary."

My father, the starving and bald
eagle
scoffs, ruffles his feathers, and sits down,
sets down.
He squawks an idiots' squawk.

My mother,
the awkward Persian cat,
swishes her tail in a half-interest;
she licks her paw.
Meow, she meows
quite plainly, Meow.

A few parakeets tweet their pleasant tweet
for a pleasing moments' pleasure before they must go.
The sunlight sparkles on their wings, but then
the sun sets.

The smiling yet melancholy
adolescent tigeress'
eyes turn
to slits.

She still grins.

And my claws protrude from my hands
and retract,
my fickle ears shoot up, fold over, and disappear;
my tail snakes around my human thigh and flickers.

Blood pours from my mouth,
black blood.
And I wonder where
the innocence went; I wonder where
my memory has gone.
Where has childhood fled to?

And why have we all turned to animals?

Radiohead - Karma Police

"This is what you get.
This is what you get.
This is what you get
when you mess with us..."

Now is the Final Act

The scene cuts away, and the camera pans out.
I take my final bow.

A faint melody is playing in the background,
the musings of a distant piano player.

It is 12:12 AM. The room is dark now, finally. The play has finished.
Now I may rest.
The lights are dimmed.

The crowd is filtering out.

They have prepared their testimonies, written on paper,
their prosecution and defense.
These are my sentiments, on the stage,
and this is the reviewers' backlash.

I am the playwright condemned,
the freelance
writer.

The fleeting muse has taken flight,
and the production has been swallowed.

Encore, a soft voice cries, encore.
But the voice is wholly ignored.

Now is the Final Act.

Winter

At the end of this road, there will be no more winter.
From December to March, those months are better spent sleeping;
Let your heart find rest in this forced hibernation.

The warmth that was once spread across this grateful surface
retreats, crawling back into the sun.
And the wind that once tickled your skin
and turned pinwheels,
now whips and rages, taming
the unforgiven land.

The doe, with wide eyes,
scrapes her hoof across the snow,
but the grass is frozen over;

Some tigers have been stalking her,
now with a snarl, they pounce
and she goes limp and is no more.