The Serpent Coils

The serpent coils
in your secret garden
winding ivy wandering through your hair
filaments of gold
painted lips of pallid rose

I try to resist
against this futile wish
my heart a crush of splinters
in my perfidious bones

your eyes shimmer
of distant memory
sea water glass
the wash of time
and more time

moth flit fills my head
another year
wastes and wears us
like a rag

Time

Time a snake. Time white-water rapids. Something changes. The rage dissolves like sugar in hot water. Something shifts over like a lover in the bed. I look through clean windows. I look right through you as if you had been dissected in a magician’s box. The uncertainty melts like wax below a flame, evaporating into thin air. I feel the weight of time. The oppression of memory. I circle through the labyrinth of your emotions. I want to dance forever in the courtyard of your heart. I want to keep you safe and warm. I am not who I was. I am not who I will be. Time a race. Time a fine line. I was stretched and taut like an elastic band until I snapped one day. Then I came back from the edge. I looked down into the abyss and came back. I’d created it myself. Some things are still hard to admit. But I came back alone. I didn’t turn to salt. I didn’t drop my bones in rats’ alley. The palace of wisdom surges up at the end of the road but it has no doors. I came back for you even though we’d never met in this life. I was meant for you, a reward for all my pains. You see me in the light. You close my wounds. Our hands and eyes are open like our hearts.
​

Transition

Naked, she glides golden
through the moonlight,
cloaked in the mellifluous songs
of katydids.
She is not afraid.

Leaves crisp crackle
in footsteps’ wake.
A ghost sentinel
of slender silver birches
keeps her safe.

Heart steel,
she sheds her old body
like a snake molting
withered paper skin,
bones vanishing to ash.

Against the dark
the ninth phoenix rises.
He opens his glistering eyes
and tastes the bittersweet light
of the stars.
​

Slow Mortal Burn

Without you my blood ceases to flow. My heart a giant clot like cloying milk. Blood curdles, blood stains. These empty hands clutching patches of air. Breathing blades instead of oxygen. Why did I go so far away again. A lesson never learned as my face wears as thin as the skin of a dusty onion. I drown in the white noise. Here the lack of your voice. This was my choice. How I must love to wallow in the beds of ash left by the after-math of your slow mortal burn. This coil constricts like a Victorian corset. I wither in the dry and desperate bone cage. I want to be filled with the radiance of your ethereal light and soar free of the dark left by the ravages of the savages. Consume my tattered remains like a cannibal. Scarlet and raw, lay me in your mouth so sacred and rare. Swallow me down and keep me undigested within you, whole, in the safe haven of your body.
​

Glitter and Gladiola

I am the spy. I am the Chinese writing on the wall. I am the ivy tendril curling around the white-hot forge of your presence. I am twisted lotus mind. I am brute force empty fist with my Bruce Lee howl. I am the spark of knife on bone. I am the house of love. I am the waxy tiger orchid. I am the black-ink brush hovering over the virgin page. Your body the page. You are a field of wildflowers and fire. You are the microscope, bringing everything into focus, sharp and clear. You are the moment in-between breath. You are song carried on air. You are the empty space in the bed. You are glitter and gladiola. You are smoke in my fingers, a fine magician’s trick, and I marvel at your ability to disappear and reappear in one long, languid blink. You are. Not only this, but more.