A Treat for Wednesday

from someone dear.

Come Alone

I see you in my mind's eye, all ready to go out, out the door and into the world.
You pause and glance back, but I know you're just wondering if you left anything.
Anything besides me. Anything you might still need.

Luz/Zephyr

Hummingbird sharp, dart,
darting.
look and it flares into
me. I remember now what
I was becoming. A light,
alight the waves, and dark.

478

She dealt her pretty words like Blades—

How glittering they shone—

And every One unbared a Nerve

Or wantoned with a Bone—

She never deemed—she hurt—
That—is not Steel's Affair—
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh—
How ill the Creatures bear—

To Ache is human—not polite—
The Film upon the eye
Mortality's old Custom—
Just locking up—to Die.

--Emily Dickinson

Banded Krate

Diving in the Deep

Diving deep, this thing with you, oceanic. I lose myself daily in you, and will lose myself again and again. Consumed, love devoured. Go deeper, you say, to touch the sky.

Invocation of My Demon Brother

Kenneth Anger.

Dear-Heart/Dark Angel

Light bearer, dark angel, a fix and a fall.
Fall to rise and rise to fly. The shadow side
of a twinned star roars beyond the horizon.

Surrender

Ah, here I am, circling back to myself in a strange and haunted place, dark and dangerous-deep. Time turned me monster. Battling the darkness, but already vanquished, I surrender, and only now, do I find myself again, in the mirror of a flawless shield. Those are adders that were my hair. Gaze long on my serpent eyes, for you alone are immune to their stare. I'll bear my banishment better with an emptied mind, and I'm not afraid. I lose my head all the time.

Passing Dark

Today my dark mind's taken flight.
If you look out you can probably see it.
Crow-like, a thing ripped out of night.
This white half-forgotten light
bewilders my dark-accustomed sight.

Encanto/Incantation/Cantando

I knew a man who spoke to flowers, set them trembling, whispering their secrets to the quivering air. Delicate things have the most subtle powers. Water over stone, fairy pond, and Merlin's throne, crow calls and the forest sighs long. "Listen to the world," you said. "Learn it's song." Shadows have shadows if you know how to look. We see so much clearer in the dark. My shadow's shadow has a bit of yours quantum entangled at its heart.

Forest, lake, indigo, night, turning.

This thought-spider spins a thread, tenuous- thus -indestructible, widow-wise, widow-dark that shivers, aeolean, with your breath. Casting, perl, cast. The leaves spell out my strange refrain, convey it to the passing wind. Winding, winding, weaving my way back to find where first heard my name whispered by the falling rain.

Fleeting, lightning, improbable, nearly, touching.

Venture/Slipping Out

I'll venture out after twilight slips in,
I slip out. Maybe this time far, far out
beyond where the sunset stains the sky crimson
I'll find my way drawn by the beacons I left
drawn by a beacon heart, drawn to a scent of-
what is that?
olibanum, olive blossom, dragons blood.
seven days on you'll see my ghostly
leavings, seven days on to walk familiar
a familiar path.

Medusa

girl, monster, weapon
what a progression

Burning/Possessed

I'll burn, as I should. The conflagration is my own creation. Self made, in this way, by self-immolation. I tried hard to put out fires, but, myself, was the match and the tinder. The real madness was believing I put my pieces back together and the space you, darkness, took in me could be other occupied. Demon, I'm gladly possessed. Come in and make a home. You'll not want for warmth and you can sharpen your claws on my medusa's heart. You, alone, I can never turn to stone.

Near, Never Far

What are time and space
to my willing-captive
heart?

Someone Gave a Gift

On Entering the Sea

Love happened at last,
And we entered God's paradise,
Sliding
Under the skin of the water
Like fish.
We saw the precious pearls of the sea
And were amazed.
Love happened at last
Without intimidation...with symmetry of wish.
So I gave...and you gave
And we were fair.
It happened with marvelous ease
Like writing with jasmine water,
Like a spring flowing from the ground.

~Nazir

Singular

Singular, you were
always. Never,
for you a near
replacement.
Never, not
close.

You for me, only
an absence
or presence.

Never an option,
but an absolute.

found

Momentos Grande
Te Esperan

Your Night is of Lilac

BY MAHMOUD DARWISH
TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH

The night sits wherever you are. Your night
is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes
from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass
and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—
a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams
equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller
in your lilac night, I am he who was one day
me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed
the heart’s rank between two grades: neither
the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies
a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you
is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night
is the covenant of night, crawling in my body
anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery
that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer
I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night
staring at itself safe and assured in its
endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror
and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors
who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry
on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others,
and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry
moon in the remoteness of speech ...

Witch House

Medusa

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
—Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

invocation

El, mas grande

Heal Your Many Ills

I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
O, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!

Excerpted from "Dark Rosaleen," by James Clarence Mangan

Vain/Imagined

Into deep and demon dark,
there you go my demon heart,
to that savage place,
Wholly enchanted.
Haunted and demon-loved,
demon devoured.

You/Blue

Cerulean
Prussian
Azurite
Cobalt
Indanthrone
Ultramarine
Lapis
Manganese
Pthalo

To paint you-
a complicated hue.
You-
Stunning,
complex,
heartrending
blue.