ཀ

Foilsick, sharing muse with a stranger. He coils to me in nauseating flares of olives, liquor soaked. Cologne so foreign, it permeates & soils my hair as he whispers for the horrid. Requests of contamination, what music I keep to myself in shame of my dead stars that fall webbed a spider’s light in the corner of this bar. Daydream lies at the cost. Open a bigmouth & lose sentimental scars. Exposed is a truth of Pandora’s tunes. Vulnerable is a musician’s muse. I gander for a while at wooden floors, counting the ware of sole-struck boards. They let me stand & consider wrapping my ankles in diving chords. I’ve lost your sillage in exchange for vodka spillage, & my leather coat is not the same. Tainted & estranged; I speak inebriated, I speak with memoirs of you holding my arm whilst I learned a cane. He ushered me cup which is clouded & my skin wrings in a name for a jacket to be abandoned once mounted. I itch for a blame, spew curses to save face, then step on toes on the way out alone for once in my selfish gain.

In the late days, I slip beyond the most forced cortex of my mind and travel to a subconscious optic for a flare of fate in my own paracosm. Delirious, it makes me daydream. A better high than a hypnotic slumber as I remain lucid in this esoteric land. Stroke my alter ego, become the vera icon for just a few moments. Becoming the vagabond of an orphic trance and remaining sovereign to the music I spin to dance. I am myself, simply manifested in a vision of a future.

On the occasion, I’ll behave so fantastically & allow the cyanotypes of light burn into my pupils, letting them burn me blind whilst the cells scurry to repair the narrow canal before my choice of dilation. I can’t help how amusing new shapes arise behind my eyelids. A fireworks morphs into a beautiful lily, into an urchin, into a smeared orb of flat purples. Despite random doses of extravagance & imaginary wonderland flowers, I find a preference for the mundane & wanting to water the concrete my row home is built on. Assuming something grand in my favour instead, like having a lawn. Fake it ‘til you make it.

The women with these insights tell me I could be anyone with anything. Groom my self-concept, stand tall on such a pedestal, and I take their advice. Massaging subliminals into the sulcus of my mind. Words hold power, mystically so or not—neurons on fire with the worth of rebirth, but I can’t shed it. Basking in the casualty of a past life–they tell me I ought to be 55 by now–is a guilty pleasure. Not the arguments or fights, but the songs & the drunken nights. I pluck from my collection, pressed vinyl memories to fuel my cerebral sparks & immerse myself in a euphoric, maladaptive evening.

Here, I have control of my acid drops. No ghoulish visages rear in the hallways of my home when I’m strikingly still, whilst the astravore in me is projected outside of a mortal calendar, into something more seen. I am stone cold sober at the touch of my cheek. Maybe Heaven is a 7 minute trip. DMT awaiting to free to ease. Solace of my mattress to impress my foaming, frothing maw of a subconscious so spectacular that maybe one day when I wake, I’ll walk into pulsing land where there is a lawn, some luck & a life full of meant-to-be’s. There are still rolls of film to burn.

𓁿

Tendrils of nerveless endings soaked in trace minerals of sundown trails. Rivulets, dreaming of sweat for summer, lacking thunderstorms. Coast Guard watch. Melt the sugar off your preening nose, your crooked-lipped grin. Dipping my head for shading wins.

Awaiting hours for success, fate refined, raindrops trailing panes to be divined.

“I thought of you the whole time.”

August gnaws at your knees, press to cheek.

Lap of the lover, worn rope burn for silica sniffing sands & tide-high thighs. Garter cordage for inept moors like weeding gauze & manila rot. Shedding auburn, snipping brunet thins. Siorcanna shreds gently, shrouded in selkie silks. Nape of mine now nothing more than sweltering skin. Swapping mints in menthol tins decorated in ashed hats & lip matte.

Sun poisoning, a lifetime of lung erosions.

Cloister pearls, pilled, too real to be burnt, yet to scrape the enamel off our cartilaginous beach. Undressing & tending ached-maws to saltwater in the electrical wind of the floor fan, atop svelte quilt trims in designer shells. UV shallow prints.

Drilling holes to adorn loosened bones with barbed wire, bass-line tones. Sun Tory fires, room-temperature Sémillon glints. Summer sanctioned in the botulistic bins of row home sins. Slacking off dead cells of amaranth, crimson tints. Epidermis of a year-long pinch stitched with snailing, sluggish pins. Beaded curtains lack chiming. Prisms gained from starlit brims.

Aloe Vera hair in fistfuls of molten foliage, soaked in a clammy palmed grip. Regret echoes with only one source of relief from tile-funding chills. I begged you to sacrifice hazel sight for a chance to slip in the sunshine from your camera-shuttering blinds. Admitted truth, I dismissed for heat-stroking muse that made flush to your hypocritical moves;

“You rarely crossed my mind.”

𓂃𓂁𓂃

_{First Publication Debut:}

^{The poem ‘Shreds Siorcanna’ was first published in Fang & Flower, Heatwaves, Issue 2. (May 31, 2026).}

Lithe, I am. Lying in the depths of the Pampas Grass.

Infesting the landscapes through which my foot steps once ran. Sneaking a peek at the newborn lambs. They’d prance the way whilst lithe, I lay, letting the chance of Lyme rise. Prance, I may, when I stand on my own two legs. Nothing worse than a cramped calf, system-snaring, peripheral peg. All except to feed the mites & feel no bites, of which the tick boxes may. Lithe, I lay when my withering leg was nailed down in a strange crucifixion to stay.

෴

^{Judd, Kelly Louise. Sinking In. Swan Bones Art.}

                                  ﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Eesome Erosions.

Carved crevices of the carapace. Marginal, corroded with lines of sketched time.

Dusted in the notches are ashes of life, tobacco, & aged spice. A divination scattered upon a tray so opalescent. Iridescent, crescent slice. Belly-up muscles, cradling lime.

All from the pour of a chalice shared, yet the old company never thought of the host twice. Soirée for a deal to suffice. Dining table of chairs raised off the sand bars, serving salted caim. Liquor pried. Ushering the dripped, sunned whiskey from the temperament of horizons for roads opened, mouth wide.

Supper on the surf for ambered saffron rays, made way for the pigment of expensive days. Forthcoming is swelling cellular waves.An exo fractured off marrow flowing bones. Olive offering to the unknown. Freshened breath snapping at the exposed nodes beyond the threshold of scutes sheltering home.

Don’t abandon the view of shimmering gold.

༯

                                  ﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

As of today, it’ll be one year since the cowardly exit of a spirit in pallor. Wordless, after many years of being the only one spoken to. I have had plenty of dreams of a renewed arrival. Always just the same. When the rain poured for days & was not lifted until the evening. When the car lights of a silver vehicle rounded narrow city corners in the humidity of remembrance &, maybe, my hatred. Not sure. I have no license, I have no commute other than wishful guidance, whispering to the celestial for a conjunction. Venus-Jupiter. I’ve prayed on shooting stars only miles away from where the Atlantic sharks preyed in the mar. Developing a sense of defeat is inevitable after a year, but worse is the sense of impending doom. Almost as if I am expectant of my favoured spectre. It differs from the ups & downs of euphoric delusions to depressive, burnt-out fumes. It’s very guttural. Sensed just below my sternum in the cradling of the solar plexus, the way the moon peeks beyond clouds after thunder rolls out. I’ve consumed a sliver of it. It growls the same way the heavens do, & in a similar fashion, on the right possible day when it’s the sun instead of the lune, the apparition of a rainbow is a gamble. I’ve developed a taste for poker. Practicing my face when the plexus quakes as I draw cards of any spade or major arcana. My favourite is The Star. Hope is envisioned in a card. It’s my personal version of an incoming flush of life. I’d pull The Fool too, because if you’re reading this, or you know me, I sound utterly incredible; it’s almost a compulsion to check in with my plexus. Biological compass.

I truly believe in my intuition. So where is my call? Last year, I decided to blame my poor data for that, too. My life has spiralled strangely, but it’s a spiral. A circle overlying itself over & over again so fatefully, it’s bound. I’m always revisited by spirits in one way or another. Shark-infested waters, whirlpools, the pinnacle of a pearl that always starts from its irritant. I’m waiting for it to spew out instead of force. It’ll be far prettier if I leave it be to ready itself alone without my hasty fingers prying it open.

I’m trying to accept what it is in just being.

༯

                Might I lie here, my love?

Lie the conch of my cartilage to your thumping beat. Lie with my tongue to the disease of your presence, whiskey of your mouth refutes at my wine all for liquor to fall &𓂃 tread upon with the soles of leather on feet. Might I lie about the rays donning you in light so divine that I, myself, could devote a shrine if my hands weren’t painted red, splattered by my disdain of time?

Too long for a cup to brew, the length of my vice from the pier to the city’s post. Do it all self-made to avoid the bella, pew, photobooth. How about a table for two? No, three. You, the little, if I am lucky, me. 𓂅 Attention falters whilst down in my debt. Kneeling unclean.

I’ve poured caramel before. Melt next to hearts, boil down before core. Disgust in the worth of the night before & shrug off my shoulders, my shoes drag dirt onto your floor. Pour glue to a glossy blur, peel silkened furs, honeysuckle scents & street riddled battles, rattled spurs. 𓂃 All I know is to sew just the same when filling up a cup & partaking in the competition of such a becoming made man’s game. Honour of the thrill, I’m favouring a new name.

So might I lie here, my love?

Wish snowdrops inside your doors aloud when I know the sun shines through the panes. 𓍼 Brighter, no longer the same, whilst I battle my own sense of living shame.

༯

      Aroma of simmered cinnamon,  anise,  clove  &  citrus pot set on the stove.  I find home in the pine balsam I place on my tongue for sweetened hives to cool in sifting sugars of snow.  𓂃   Red candles,  lit flames.    Lick cranberry wax whilst I crave just the same.  How cruel it can be when the deer do not lay at the foot of the forest nor bedside me.   Sugar pill of the coated words that once lulled to sleep. 𓍼

      I’ve sent a letter out for the cloaked egregore’s omnipotent reply.   Same wax-sealed envelope,  my postage stamp of a thumbprint shaping west, or north. ࿓    May the organic fibers of my being all stay together like the swirl of the steam from the pot of gag  &  evaporate to the next like spirits of impressions visualized,  meant to be.    Repeat the phrase,  saliva on a chalice of mulled liquor blessed by a star shining east.   For someone out there enters an eve of peace.  ༄      Not you nor I.   Nor someone else who sleeps most high who will wake to hear the inheritor of a burden’s cry over singular wine.

      I must apologize for what I plead,  for I am gluttonous.   Full of entangled wants & needs.   But it is not more clothes on my back that I feel greed.   Just a letter,  a dot on an answer machine or visit from the ghost who challenges me of the past,  manifested like a dose of fermented honey mead.

                                                                                                                 𝜗ৎ

            Black,  lace-clad cloth throws itself over the visage of what is in the night.   Mine.   Sights pierce the woven slits,  trying to get a glimpse of Samhain’s midst.    The valley stretches vast & eerie, where the shepherd’s dog howls & the rabbit goes weary.    Fauna runs from the cloaked thing,  that of which my own eyes cannot seem to pin.   The cloth itself is skewed,  lighting down the path unwinding.   I shed its ignorance in an annual unbinding of string-to-string tied rituals of diligent candle-lit timing.  𓂃     

  	 Coat you in my ivory & I in what’s highly protective rounds preventing the grasp of something of the fourth world unkindly.   Shapeshifting fiend haunts the hare in his trek up the hills of Meath,  calamity prowls in the quake of glass plate beneath.    The heat is too stricken,  my will off to spy upon the one who pleads on knees, 

“ I’ve to rid of this tie,  but I have no heart to do.  
Ignite the wick in thinning quicks,  
be unto me…  sure,  in the way of the split betwixt sun & moon. ”

	There is sanguine embroidery to be undone. 𓍼   Silken tapestry of one-to-one.     
 Woman crafted a verse where the man chases not her,  but the mischief of the wound under gentle gealach,  bandage of the modern moon.     The diaspora of the legend was twined in the cord of handmade marriage ribbons,  all exchanged without the vows,   just the foundation of the word.     Set red fate ablaze as the candle reaches out to the other.    Hatred to say so,  but cannot wait another.   Set fire to the ghosts of the past,  blink tears for the figments of good byes.   The oil of hers is the jinx in itself when the window pane creaks & ghastly dog’s mighty chain breaks for the startle of sheep.    Salt licked clean from the organ song of spoken fate.    They who once nuzzled their friend disperse out in their frenzy of autumnal leaves to flee the fading green.   To conjure the spirits never once caused horror to the lands such as these.  The gust of the howl reached the room’s ward,  something set off if cued by canine’s word.

	Lit cord has been self-armed;  this unbinding won’t do.   Torched the face once veiled & freed eyes gain the colors to see into.   Singed coil summoned the target,  the latching love-lock’s hair.   The Púca crawls the first night of hourly peak in the tall,  tick-dying grass. 𓂅     Backfiring success,  the ghost of a jest to speak my language,  but decide it’s silent is best.   The longing of the summer was withered out & dried.   I thought I’d die trying,  but I’ve gotten what is rightfully mine.	

          The lantern life of the spirits detest the entanglement of his;  I cannot help the harp’s tendineae,  nor defy the song it strings.    My ring on right faces inward as it’s cast in sterling & not iron for no article can keep my phantom away even if the ranging valley is in its instinctive nature.  𓂃    I’ll enjoy the air thinning,   I’ve shed the shapeshifting veil for the free breath of air.  Autumn shall bless me as two flames dance the eve.    Forget the unbinding,  this haunt will never cease.   The other side of life has shown unto me beauty of the harvest before frost-ridden trees.    Blazing,  black lace will serve as a light to the fleeing,  even circling around the Púca whose weakest epithet is opening,   barking,   bleeding.

                                                                The crease of time flattens;  it ceases to exist.
 The world beyond here lapses,  bestowing with benevolence the cold-kissed mourner a gift.   

༯

                              Hot candle wax drips down ‘pon left shoulder,    𓂃 
                                                              who cried out  ? 	    the war is over  !
 Sophisticated rage,          the field of bronze boulders.         Tired,   burnin’ out.
                    Heart   beat   covering   from   progressing   colder.
  The moon been waxing to cue maroon hues,         mop the powder to the rock,         
             dig a grave for fellow few.           Trumpets sounding,     blaring,     screaming. 
       Tinnitus of a herring,      ringing.                       𓍼         ‘   I will adorn you.  ‘       
	    
Warm wax,  crescent of the collared born flesh.              Heated,         brushed.   ᭪
	   Flame of an older world,           ignited spirit of a venial pearl.
  Grind sanded to the teeth,       burn up the faux plain thing.          Worn the nape.

              Would you  –  something you foul –  be so nice to take my height ?    
				                                   Take my age  ?              Take this plight  ?
      Pay you well  &.       good,         ain’t even gotta do it right.         𓂅
                         Bargain your blood-brain barrier.               Wait up all night.
   Count aloud for the will to might.     𓂃       Granted grace,           advantage of wage.
	 I can beat you at these fun  &.   games.        ‘Cause it’s my rules,      my ways.
        Branded ༯    faded,  punky jerk,      have my taste of low.          Forgotten foe.

  Cruelty of owing everyone my everything.          Knees do not dent the wood stain.
        This organ,        filthily pleated,      
                                                            so heavy in the cavity I feel as though I may die.
             Night hardens up a cooling bee’s buzzed      𓂅         palm to tallow.     
                    It is so heavy.     Drum thudding.        Hard pill to swallow.

  Staining candle wax of auburn ‘pon left shoulder.   
			                                   Time worn out.       Yet somehow getting older.   
          Just get up,     untangle autumn–tied knots,    &.         get back to work on that 
                          darling,                                                    ༯    sanguine halo. 
  

Amid blackened cathedrals of wills for the fonder,
cavity of pinions,     spurs gone to ponder.
An etching hollow click,
pedals of organs,    throat going thick.

Procession in the eve of pagan pursuits,
shameful hedonists pries amongst this picky queue.
In breaking time,     you could get me to bow to you
 –  what else is there to do? 

They’ve found their mitts to the malleable,
procured acrylics &  melted to be palatable.
Angelic the Androgen to allude,
Hear,  gears of my Beatitudes. 

All where blasphemy born a babe.
My taste does not suit,    cue heavenly blames.
Inherit this beating,    cardiac karma,
Could this plight be considered pious?
Where is my prayerful pharma?

Something here is at stake,
maybe the muse of a machine gone fake.
An earthly desire tempts most from rain up higher.
Spores of the floor boards are inevitable to quake.

Stability sours,    so one of desperation turns to kneel.
Knuckles grip in cowering of almighty,
a diaspora of splinters breach my heels.
The apparatus in the name Aphrodite.

So peace be with you,  
you may go quietly. 
                 ༯

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This piece was written in collaboration with the artwork titled "Are You Even Human?" by Raquel Faria  ( IG: @raquelfaria_art ).