even torn sails still billow

the way we go thieving is a murder of death. all any single one can be expected to do is survive, and there is no failure in doing so except to not.

the lack of free will is a liberation. if i do not choose my actions, then i am not to blame for them. i need only follow my nature. to be led to salvation or doom. but shrug off all notions of imprisonment. we refute not belonging to ourselves.

it is clear that the rules of this place are not just. otherwise explain the death of the good, justify misery in the face of bounty, happiness at the center of sorrow. the choice not to see the whole is just that, a choice. the fact of embracing one's own powerlessness is not a giving in or a giving up, on the contrary it betrays the presence of those willing to look life in the face. these are the true saints.

Naked Woman Playing A Burning Cello

In the gap between sleep and dreams she sits,
her music a crushing lightness upon you,
thin red ribbon of desire
tight around your throat.
Her bare flames, a phonecall
from a smoke of voice, half-familiar,
bathed in fog.

She pours her forearm forward
in a question mark deja vu
that carries up over the slope of her shoulder,
slow walk through the bright-flowered fields of total madness.

Your body holds itself in a paralyzed slump,
enslaved by the gradual morse code
broadcast between ember and ash.
The curve of her back is a knife edge searing through your ribs,
like being destroyed by a feather.
As the flames beneath her fingers begin to sing a death song
in the key of hollow twilight minor,
you start to sway,
the notes gorging themselves upon your vertigo,
all your molecules running together like watercolor,
ecstatic sex of dissonance,
your lungs a palace of drowning,
ready to let in the flood.

When she finally looks at you,
at the top of the precipice she has built,
you can feel yourself go,
your cables cut clean,
an elevator in the throes of a swan dive plummet,
frenzied rush of stories pressed into manic lights and sounds that kiss you as you pass,
the sharp lines that geometry begs for from the chalkboard,
all things frozen at another level now,
breasts pressed against the wood,
gravity's grey anger spread below you,
perfection,

and then blissful nothing.

When you no longer hear the music,
it is not that she has stopped playing,
it is that you have unravelled from your spool
into a heartache of yellow thread,
gone endless upon the floor.