Love is an oak leaf placed in a fire
The leaf blackens and curls
Until a spark ignites the leaf and
Sends currents of fire racing through its veins
Turning what was alive and fresh into ash

Will you still love me when I betray you?
My betrayals will be small.
No knife in the back and “Et tu, Brute?”
No thirty pieces of silver and Romans leading you away

Instead, you will ask me how I’m doing and I’ll say I’m fine
While inside a maelstrom rages, consuming fishing trawlers and cruise ships, drowning innocents in the depths of a blackened ocean.

Instead you will turn to me and ask what’s on your mind and I’ll say nothing.
While angry goblins with yellowed broken nails claw at my brain and impregnate it with parasitic ideas

My betrayals will add up.
Slaves built the pyramids by stacking rocks.
One
By
One
Eventually, my betrayals will form a ziggurat casting a shadow over the fields of Mesopotamia.
On a mild spring day, the farmers will feel a chill and know that it comes from the pyramid above.

I will drink the hemlock drop by drop, my betrayals filling my hungry mouth.

When you ask do you still want to be with me,
I will open my mouth to reply yes, I love you, you are my sun and moon, when I think about all that is good in the world, only your face fills my mind, but instead,
I will spit poison in your face and your eyes will swell,
your teeth will rot and your ears will fracture and distort.
I will watch as you shrink, your face becoming a reflection of mine,
Your gremlin hand lifting a revolver as you put it to my head and pull.


Hope is a eldritch god slumbering in the depths.
When HE wakes, the world quivers in terror.
HIS red right hand bursts through the waves scattering fishermen like casino chips in a poker table.
When HE walks, the air tastes different, full of sweat-scented anticipation and freshly-laid heat.

Beware HIS last prophet proselytizing on a windswept shore.
The prophet speaks in tongues, screaming HIS unholy gospel to the roaring sea. The prophet’s damned prayers are buried by the moans of a thousand sacrifices as HE awakes.
The earth opens and its crevasses fill with unending rows of teeth.
The prophet stands alone, frozen in ecstasy as he is swallowed by his god.
Falling, the prophet screeches the last line of HIS gospel.

“When HOPE walks, the world shudders. When HOPE walks, beware the changes. When HOPE walks, all ends.”

The moon blackens. The stars begin to redden.
The sun spews purple flame, the last gasp of a dying universe.
His stone-slick hands move inward.
Galaxies swirl around HIM, shit swirling the drain.
All of existence compresses into HIS clenched fist.

Slowly, gently, his fingers unfurl.
At the center is a point, both infinitely dark and infinitely bright.
With a pop, HE falls back into a deep boundless slumber.
His tentacled mouth cracks into a satisfied smile.
The infinite point falls from his hands.
As it falls, Expansion.
Existence comes back.

For HIS first prophet in this new universe, HE leaves the new Gospel:
When HOPE walks, all ends, but something better begins.

I remember the setting sun plunging into the lake and
The scent of impending loneliness in my sinuses
You held my hand as we watched an abandoned rowboat float
Slowly across the lake, oars lost to the depths.
After you let go and walked into the water, I could still feel
Your fingerprints in that space between my knuckles where you had rested.
I watched as you melted into the part of my mind that never stops working, That never stops ticking,
That never punches a clock
That never ends the song that it’s singing
That never dozes off after a drunken night
That never becomes anything more than an eternal Tomb for the Unknown What Ifs.

Your head sunk below the surface and the water became still.
For a while, I imagined that the lake was a sidewalk made of the deepest bluest asphalt and I could just walk past you, look down and smile like I was looking at a child’s chalk drawing.

I’d look at that drawing and it wouldn’t have your pastel smile.
It wouldn’t have your dark uvula.
The lake would not swallow me like yesterday’s takeout.
Instead I’d be doing my best impression of Jesus, sauntering above you as if you were nothing more than a stingray in a tank at a science museum.

So I tried. 
I placed a hesitant foot on a Lily pad.
I hopped onto the crest of a wave.
I slid along a current. 
I chased a frog.

I looked down and below me, all I saw was the great expanse of you.
I gasped for breath.
I stumbled.
I drowned.

Our village sits in a giant’s shadow
Although no giant is there
We see the shadow eat our children
And shit out empty air

We hired a giant killer,
His sword silver and bright
But the fool decided to wait
Until the darkest night.

When we woke the next day
The shadow was still there
The giant killer had been eaten too
And flung into the air

Another giant killer came,
His mind cunning and bright.
He laid a trap for daytime,
He would not go at night.

We watched him the next morning,
His bow and arrow were there
The giant’s hand picked him up
And crushed him in the air.

The king brought his armies,
His military clean and bright
He destroyed our village
And camped there overnight

When we woke the next day,
No soldier was alive there
The giant had killed the army
And left only empty air.

Our village sits in a giant’s shadow
Although no giant is there
But we remember he protected us
And smile to the empty air

“It must have come in the night
when I slept, dreaming of
a godly party where ambrosia and
nectar were merely appetizers.”

Infinity shakes off the hangover
The headache of bubbling supernovas
He stumbles to the already steaming coffee machine
Drains a planet’s ocean for his caffeine needs

Infinity crosses the kitchen to grab his phone
His uneven footsteps deified by ululating men in loincloth
His bathrobe pockets are filled with the crumbs of galaxies that never were
His eyes caked with the dust of galaxies that never will be.

Infinity lies to the boss, a false illness in his voice
Two million people cough themselves to death
He climbs back into bed, swaddles himself with
blankets made from a thousand forests
and falls asleep dreaming of the work to be done tomorrow

I see an old woman sitting in a hospital bed
her glasses are bent and well-used
her teeth are yellow like the pages of an old comic book
but her eyes are still full of amber light

I remember the first time I saw her in
a dive bar in a Brooklyn back alley sitting at a cigarette-scarred table,
Whiskey-colored light winks from a single bulb above her head

But that fades away,
Nitrate film ignites.

I see a young woman, plexiglass strong,
the barstool beneath her creaks in sympathy as she waits for me.
But I’m not there yet.
Instead, she waits for her next conquest, the jester of the bar

I remember a teenage girl giggling about the boy next door,
He doesn’t like me with my skinned knees and tangled hair
But you don’t know that every Saturday morning
His mother wipes the dew off his bone-cold brow
And implodes slivers of dream filled by your crackling smile

But that dissolves,
Sugar cubes in the teacup

I see a girl playing with headless Barbies
you can imagine better heads than dead plastic smiles
heads with large fronds like a prehistoric palm tree
the leaves pockmarked by the teeth of the long necked dinosaurs living below

I remember a tombstone with your name inscribed.
My bones ache with the weight of memory.
My eyes dim with the light of you.
My skin creases, a pale imitation of your smile.

But that implodes,
Paper crumbling in a toddler’s hand.

Our days seem so far off.

I remember standing in the middle of an abyss,
While you stand on both edges, looking into the center.
Our eyes never meet, but I see you.

Heat, power, you rush toward me from both sides.

Our days are here.
Finally.

Why does my heart race whenever you are near?
It’s fear.
Cold and implacable
A clawed hand wraps around my heart and squeezes with all the restraint of an overexcited dog on a chew toy.

Crush me.

It’s easy to mistake fear for love.
Butterflies in the stomach and heat in the face.
But they both sing the same song.

Unworthy.
Keep your mouth shut.
Run.
Hide.
Lie.

Do all you can to obscure.
Drop smoke bombs like a ninja on his first day of ninja school.
Misdirect like a con man desperately trying not to get beaten by the sucker whose wallet he just lifted.

Lie with me.

He drinks through another night of broken promises and lost loves.
Regrets that taste sweeter than lemon drops and the sour powder at the bottom of candy bags. The chemical burns from the sour powder pain him in a familiar way, one that he’s never quite escaped.
A prison that calls to him, a prison that is filled with tender hands and unforgiving lips, a prison with no wall, no bars and no guards, but still the prisoners stay.

Touch me.

Cultists swell and burn to an unheard beat, forceful and unyielding.
The skies are empty of all light.
The black descends to the earth, a curtain falling at the end of a play.

Welcome to the end.
I hope you were worthy enough to see it.
An apocalypse is a beautiful thing, the death of all.
Fear, Love, Hope all burn the same color.

The victims fall to the executioner, his wicked axe falling into an apathetic rhythm.
In their terminal moment, the victims wail in virulent ecstasy.
Listen to fear flee down the gallows.
It fills you with a instinctual pleasure, a desire to hunt.
Listen as it whispers with succubus tones.

Die with me.

Haven’t you been tired?
Waking up 30 minutes before the alarm rings.
It’s just long enough to fall back asleep.
Eyes sealed with caked loneliness,
Dust suspended in an unending dawn.

Wake up!
Smell the roses!
Today is going to be a great day!

But not for you.

Their smiles build a cage of pristine white veneers.
The laughter is a casket of cacophony
suffocating and claustrophobic.
The good mornings are cloying and
Saccharine, Chanel No. 5 at a Victorian funeral.

Get better, you rage
The heat filling your nose,
Ozone and flame.

Your hand pounds your broken
brain,trying to beat your destruction
Into submission.
But your mind ignores the Morse
code message.

S
O
S

If only your mind was a telegraph.
Simple. Easy to understand.
Built to communicate.
Powered by electricity.

Instead, it is a Saturn 5 rocket.
Powered by spit and ingenuity.
Delicate yet explosive.
A testament to your brilliance.

You stand at the foot
of the launch pad.
Gazing up in
awe and majesty

Remembering the astronauts who
cremated in the capsule.
Remembering the failed launches
and the explosions on the pad.
Remembering the stillness of a
space walk, all alone for thousands
of miles.

You turn away,
a hidden smile consumes your face.
For you know that tomorrow,
You take to the stars.