The forest is dense—light breaks
through in threads.

The woman is not a woman,
she walks slow,
becomes an S,
the path is cut dirt,
rough—
uneven—

at her hip, a satchel full of
serpents.

Black,
gold,
scaled, squirming.

They hiss—the language of doors,
spilling—a spring.

Geometry squeezed,
terra compacted, a road made.

The serpents are not serpents,
they are gold bricks.

Slick scales,
gleaming—building blocks.

Her spine is tender bark,
knotted,
ancient,
bowed low to the
ground, her face
a vessel flooded
drowning in light.

The woman is not a woman,
but a subterranean path,

the forest is not a forest,
but a silent sea

the snakes are myths 
made—

the naga’s reflection held 
in a palm of 
clay.

Clay fountain—
serpents pouring,
crawling.

The forest is a green sea
splitting, the path 
revealing

ripples,
            ripples,
endless, 
              repeating,

snakes,
snakes—gathered 
at her feet,

snakes from
the pith,

the fountain,
the forest—
two mirrors 
facing, 
paradox 
              pouring—



                  rain.

The truth came at you in angles, sideways, bent.

The days were stones—the years water.

All your life, you gathered light
in granules—

folded all your little hopes into paper stars to float in stone coffins.

You collected days like trinkets,
made a cabinet of curiosity out
of time, while simultaneously
burying your curiosity under
crushed oceans.

You drank rainwater and
ate sunshine, waiting for
what had already begun.

The days were wrung out and
folded in little acts of labor.

You watched time slip between your fingers like sand,

and still you waited, sure that you had a desert’s worth to spare.

Does joy know you?
Does sorrow know you?

Or are you an angel carved
from both?

Have you seen it,
the geometry of a shadow—

how it explodes on the ground in cubic feet?

A radius of
distilled darkness—

her face is
there, repeating,

collapsing,
                   clinging,

but always
repeating.

Only when the sun fails, quiet finds a voice.

A blue door stretches toward
me, and I see her.

My heart,
a dying
sun,

rushing to meet it,
to meet her,
letting the blue swallow
me,

release
me.

Her eyes,
cast in cobalt—
smiling,

waiting.

In the hush of dusk—the door becomes a mouth,
the mouth becomes
a door.

Memories tangle in
geometry,

the light—
seen through
angles,

the eye
caught in
a lattice of

noticing.

Indigo stillness settles—
like the crease of her leather
gloves,

her pale, mute
lips slightly
parted.

Repeating,
crushing,
erasing,

swallowing me
into her.

Old grief, wrung out
on the clothesline,
rotting in the morning light.

Shadows peeling on the
grassy lawn.

Egg yolk sun
cracking open
above the pink
ridge line.

Muted windows bleeding
light, the house is on
fire—

flickering.


Orange
             Black
                      Yellow
                                 Red



     Red mouth
   

                          Black throat

              

Choking

on

the

silent

dawn.


Cracked plaster—melting,
mouths collapsing,
soot crawling.

Smiling faces 
hollowed 
out
in 
wall photos.

Porcelain plates—
white grenades.

Blistered
cracking
skin.

Gray
holding
pain.

The heat is a wave.

Charred
suburban
decay

a
blue
mirror
glinting.


One world ending—

                     one expanding.

The rain is fingers tapping on the inside of my skull.

Ignited in red—
in a distorted mirror.

You are rotting flowers hanging against the gloss
of that blue
vase.

Limp, lifeless,
cracking—
silent on the
shadowed
altar.

I
follow the stars in the night sky;
they are messages from
afar.

Blink,
salt in the eye,
inhale, the ocean sliding toward you,
exhale—

the sun’s reflection receding,
the sea is your mirror.

Follow the light—

Your eyes are liquid fires, pits of spinning stars.

Slow turning, like the rolling hills dipped in late day.

The night awakens; you are a cluster of moths—
quickening,

in love with the haloed light.

The thrill of insects climbing,
fireflies aglow,

you are foam against rock,

eager for the light,

your feet on black stone steps,

your eyes are glowing moons,
silver tides,
casting,

the wind is wolves biting—lighting you up,

your skin is a landscape of blue shadows,

voices woven from the stretching dark,

a sunken face
peeling—

you

are

a

yellow

burning

light,

a supernova
breaking
open. 

I was shape-shifting—under umber dawns, a shaman drifting through a
sea of red spines

Arches under the sun,
casting long, slanted
shadows

Jaguar sinking into
jungle walls

Slinking ochre
nights

•

My face is stretched leather,
I cut through shadows—
serrated blade.

Sharp-eyed, mirror mouth
swallowing
time

I smile razors

Rippling red sun,
recursive black night

I wear a geometric
face, angled stitched fractals

Eyes are candles—
doused

•

Patina coils

Eyes,
pouring,
eyes,

bursting into suns

Smoke
is signal
climbing

The weight of breath,
a splitting horizon

My spine is a red
arch collapsing

Gnawing
at the
moon.

Closing
on the
bleeding 
light. 

The wind is scissors cutting glass,
slanted shafts of light
grinding—
on the water’s face.

A refracting crown
of liquid folds.

Deep blues carved,
deeper still,
a gaping chasm,
dragging me down
like a stone.

Electric thoughts—currents
becoming roads.

Submerged in cerulean
hollows—
ashes and salt
settle on moss
and against the skin of
porous rock.

Sinking further
still, to quiet
kingdoms.

Nine layers
deep.

A thermal
shaft, a
silver door—

a jagged tilt
in perception.

Traces of stars
glowing under
penumbra
depths,
with scissor teeth—
cutting—
drawing molten glass to
flame.

And me, a glowing
shard—
only in oblivion
made whole.

The water is mirror,
the mirror is
sky.

The walls are bare,
loose—

a conjoined skeleton,
a reverent vault.

They stack,
stare—

a solar flare,
then
spill on the floor,

muddied,
whole.

Risen in a valley of
muted shadows.

A
pearl
against dust.

Voices wet velvet—static,
travel in distorted echoes;

with flooded corridors—holy sigils,
the mind is a fissured
labyrinth.

Cracked—
stagnant.

Stained glass,
fracture.

Crushed

ruby

pooling—

emerald

pressing

against

violet

hues.

The self, a dot of perception—
a shadowed inception

looking up,

red-winged
blackbirds nest,

compressed angels
refracting—

A mind of stone,
no chamber
whole.

You as you, a tide
expanding

ascending

up

up

up
    
     to
       
          whole.

The chimera was a spider—

an eight-legged,
eight-eyed,

fractal.

Holding a mute sky
on its back.

Black 
Black 
Door

A burning mirror,

alone in the dark,
vibrating quiet,

weaving long threads of light

spinning in glow
until a city rose in the void,

burning
bright.

All hail the
cratered face
that hangs in the sky,
crushed under
lavender fields.

	•	

Fraying at the cliff’s edge,
unwinding
in red
thread
like the seams of
a salt-kissed
afternoon,
spun
in
the
ocean’s
foaming arrival.

Blue ripples, invisible
in the dark.

My thoughts, quivering—
sliding through the air
like an arrow flung,
screaming at the haloed
moon.

I’m no longer a shadow
stretched over stark seas.
I am a glass star—
in pieces,
hitting the
ground.

Red in the head—

red

in

the

head,

blacking out the
sky,

a thread through the eye,
hitting the ground—

shattering into

myself.

The beating heart is a walled city,
a fortress raised in red.

A dense population of
sonic,
molten
dread.

The people pool at the center,
trading fractal, concentric
thoughts.

At night, the tide rolls in—
bleeding against its shores.

The halls are coiled arteries,
lapped in sapphire
walls.

They lead them back to the center,
to a glowing,
looking
pond.

Inside a mirrored dimension,
where spirits sometimes cross,

black birds bring—
on a string—its
many numbered
codes of 
pearl.

The sound, a quaking shimmer,
a muscle made of mind.

And me, a trembling note—
lost in rhythm’s 
line.

It comes for you at night,
a petrified liquid specter.

It fuses to your spine
and turns your body to stone.

It sinks into your mind,
a living, hollow
blight.

Your scream lodges
in your throat,
a frozen breath
held.

Your chest caves in—
a sunken
core
self.

Wide-eyed—
seeing from the corner of your mind,
a moving field
of terror.

The shadows, stunted—
pulsing, enveloping you,
a clicking wave
nesting,

and all around you,
the walls swelling.

Your heart becomes the moon,
a throbbing engine cresting.

Your eyes become the ocean,
salt-filled.

Burning.

You become a blink,
a flutter of blinks in line,

until the blinks become a wave,
wings flying out of graves.

Your face becomes a mirror,
a tilted reflection—
a crack
in cognition.

An omission.

The putrid
demon
tightens—

your mind
heightens,

pouring at
the seams.

Your eyes are salt,
casting,
circles forming,
blasting.

Light flaring—
a flood of
movement,
breaking
for air.

Your chest begins
to rise,
a home on a
hill lifting.

Sigils flare
around it,
a field of light
binding it—

your spine arched,
dislodging
your chest-light,

setting
    you
      free.

A field of bruised ultraviolet light
burns through me—
a golden angle,
spiraling.

Have you ever returned to a place
after a long absence
and been surprised
by all the changes?

By the continuum of life
moving with or without you?

Especially without you.

Relentless in its pursuit
of process.

Like when fossils get buried
and history stacks itself in layers.

When cities get swallowed by jungles
and time crawls over everything,
frozen.

Forgets it.

The past is forgotten—
lost, largely unimportant.

The future is abstract,
uncertain, mystical.

The present is a dot,
a presence,
a moment.

It’s you.

The rupture is a  
moving crater;  
it burrows deep within  
your core,  
finds a way  
to stop you,  
to smother you  
whole.

You carry its silence  
in your belly—  
a blooming, blackened,  
throbbing stone.

Your jaw braces,  
your chest tightens,  
your breath shortens,  
your mind heightens—  
climbing,  
climbing,  
climbing down  
your spine,  
unwinding.

Your grip—
whitens.  

Your mind panics, 
chanting:

Don’t.  
Let.  
Go.

A mantra  
to cast the darkness  
out.

But the feeling is a clinging  
omen—  
a stolen future,  
you.

It builds a city of  
aches and hollows,  
lets the wind scatter your ashes  
in seasons.

“Nothing lasts” becomes  
doctrine,  
written in the skies,  
and your skies are  
always holding night—  
always dripping  
tar.

How do you conjure day  
when all you know is void?

Step through the mirror chamber.  
Surrender to the whole.

Build an exorcism  
of thought.

Let the moment  
that defined you  
be a prison  
left behind you.

Your future is made of choices—  
a living string of keys,  
unlocking,  
unlocking,  
unlocking  
your mind  
in threes.

Medusa’s eyes are mirrors; they drink
the light.

Her scream is satin night,
a pit,
her scales—moving
justice.

Volatile brutality,
a lifeline pulsing
written in ruin.

Wings of stone—
green, glowing globes
build vengeance
from bone.

A curved spine.

Birds in frenzy
are harbingers;
they bring
fire.

They burn
cities. 

Remember when
our hearts were
beating tangerines?

Oh,
so
sweet.

I can hear the forest
growing,
plugged into the
underground.

Cold hands,
shaky knees.

The goldfinch
prunes, perches,
discerns,
but never
yearns. 

I wear a cloak
of whispering cicadas
and hold the sky up at
night.

The night is an arched kiss,
reflections of fire—

black birds flying through mirrors,
carrying dreams.

A mind tilting,
the surface ripples,
grazes—
a most aureate dawn.

Swaying.
Spinning.
Expanding.

Halcyon seas,
greens cutting blues,
and ethereal light
tessellating on crushed
reflections of you. 

Life on Mars was
allegories clustered
in defiance.

On carmine clay fields stood—
a priestess made of liquid fire,
eyes like live wires.

Conducting voids of heavy silence,
pressing through reality.

She was holy, programmed—
anointed in numbers.

And we, the people,
crushed beneath arched glass,
cloistered in sterility,
living in bone-dry cities.

Plugged into
a dreamless stasis.

Numb.

We watched
as the faithful
broke the heavens apart
and split the sky
with sacred geometry.

Harvesting Neptune’s rings
to burn in pyres of holy fire.

Sacred.

Fire fed the flame, until—

One night,
from oxblood stone,
the dreaming tree
erupted.

Sprouting from the slumped mass of a lost colony of flying beasts—
red heaps of decaying chests,
sagging from red breasts.

Roots and delicate bones
entwining,
jutting through the
clay.

A collision of hardened consciousness
held in gnarled branches—
a hive mind of dreams—
on a bed of scattered capillaries
beneath a
mustard-yellow
primordial
dawn.

I was a mountain
of dust then,
tall.

Red.
Red.
Red.

She draped herself
in red.

Fingertip
to nail.

Around her throat hung
the iridescent oval
of a mined moonstone.

Sharp eyes, reflecting
spiraling voids.

Sparking.
Pooling.

Hungry.

She bent the people
to her will.

Devotion inverted
to anger, until the faithful
became a surging mob.

Hemorrhaging beneath their
static prayers—
no longer priestess,

now
heretic.

The will of the many,
ringing—
a ripple in an
hourglass.

The faithful and
faithless merged,
decommissioning
the coded system.

And for the first time,
life on Mars
began
to
dream.

Maybe you remembered it; maybe it remembered you.

I stack dishes and cups into a tall city.

Engineered alabaster.

Delicate.

At the top sits painted porcelain in raging yellow—
crowned with
a chip in the center.

When the sun climbs high,
the chip flares—
a burning 
star. 

When the wind moves,
the city rattles, then chatters—
becomes teeth.

A city of teeth jutting up,
wrapped in rattling
sound.

Milk-glass,
melodies.

My teeth chatter too—
the wind laughs,
the sound a long, hollow tunnel.

I walk it.

At its end, a garden,
gray giving to green.

Maybe you remembered it; maybe it remembered you.

Monarchs collide with flower beds.

Bloom comes, like frost in reverse,
stringing songs on branches, filling the air with messages.

Maybe you remembered it; maybe it called to you.

What the trees know
is a thousand years
of longing rooted in a
mechanical
heart.

Friction sparking—
burning the edges of voids—
making sure the ritual holds.

The altar calls:
a blistered clock,
hands of stone
stuck at midnight’s door.

Grinding—
a cathedral of skin
stretched tight
over bone,
glass in the eye,
an armored spine
twisting,
twisted—
forged
in the dark.

Winter’s frozen embrace—
a tomb of delight
peeling the ground
from the sky.

A white serpent coils,
swallowing stars.

Shaking the earth,
drinking the light—
rising.