chiaroscuro

Love buries itself like tree roots in our hearts Entwined like fingers gripping tight Sunken into our flesh, nails in meat It is a vise, a pleasant sort of hurt Let yourself feel the burn and relish in it You linger in its evisceration And the warm basking glow of its light Red hot like a neon sign in Vegas Some sultry finger beckoning But what happens when the tree roots are uprooted? When some unkind hand cups the soil and rips Heart from heart, naked roots dangling white in the sun Blistering pain that shoots through you You've held on for so long you forgot the loneliness The callouses have been worn away a long time ago It's a pain far worse than the pleasant ache The tree roots are now claws Raking through your heart like a feral lioness Where a smile burns and a hand scorches After all, the deeper the love the deeper the wound.

The world is a stage and we are all actors Donning masks of papier mache The play is accomplishment It's a sold out house, the people are watching Those who watch and those who sleep Their eyes are needles in the dark I can meet their expectations I can say the scripted lines But who knows when the camera will stop And the playbill will disappear Will I ad-lib my way through Broadway And smile and charm my way through life? The movements are memorized, the steps syncing I am at one with the artwork of movement The people cheer and the critics rave As I marionette my way across the gilded stage They only see the painted smile and the dark mascara And they never see the strings garrotting my wrists But if they see the bracelets then I am the accused "Why do this to yourself? How horrible!" Ringed hands on heaving chests, aghast But they do not realize that the strings choking my hands Are twined around their own limbs Jerking t

There's a display of rocketry and fireworks Somewhere on that distant horizon Oscillating colors of emerald gold fire Chains upon unending chains of velvet violet The sands are accumulating at the bottom And the quartz watch counts down in monosyllables And the world seems to fold on itself Like a paper boat sitting too long in the water Shreds of the universe fluttering into oblivion Tendrils of radiation, tentacles of disease They won't stay under for long The rubble have buried and the ash has choked Too many fragile trachea We have only survived by teeth skin and grit The world will look on in ridicule As we scramble back to the pyramid They won't see the salt in our eyes But the paper is still in the water Rapidly dissolving into nothing but indistinguishable dust All we have to do now, in this flake of time Is to stand on shattered feet, bones and blood And try to sew the ruined tapestry that is this world Back together A

I am walking a chess board sidewalk Pawn to e4, I am the King's  A dance of checkered squares Black and White and then back again I am alone but I am not lonely Sitting alone at a distant table I watch them fondly Because I know that I hold their strings I am a silver tongued siren Everything I say comes out right But once the light falls on my lips It's as black as coal The sheets are soot and ashes The fire wreathes around me I am no phoenix So I crumple to the earth like paper The under earth is troubled I sense its distress like a needle The waters will soon rise and fall And the above will be swamped with the grit of rock Take a seed and plant it In the ocean floor bed Watch it blossom into a empress And devour the sea in a gulp My wavelength is a dominant one I do not have to worry or fret But whenever hers rings just a decibel higher I grit my teeth and endure it I sit at my florescent desk And the