Without so much as a burst of white light, without so much as a beclouded face, lingering — I want to go quietly now, like sawdust in a country road — like seafoam under a gray sunset.

My mind insists on leaving.

out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.

i am half of a sun-dried breath short of being sane. i sigh and my body bathes in a mouthful of bleeding, blue december — i can feel its colder, longer days stretching inside me.

i wish january comes here soon — in fresh, comforting, yellow warmth.

i.
i carve the sadness out of my ribs like well-soaked marrows;
they fall off like a drunken secret —
a poem within a poem within a night-long quietude

that i disturb
like a child's stomping feet among the prairie dusk.

ii.
i carve a poem,
whole and out of my tightened throat
like a reverse magic trick,
but my hands break in casual irony.
i carve a word out of my tongue
but all it does is bleed.

iii.
i carve a feeling out of a callus but
my paper-skin is left too long under a lavender storm
to still write letters like these.

iv.
the sky cries to a drunken oblivion
as i unwrite this poem in indifference.
i let myself go, like that

dead houseplant drooping in corner of my room

and cheerless, quiescent sheets
watch to pass time.

like fallen flowers, i am
weary under the subtle noise of a rushing, babbling brook;
a death, quietly scenic
as i go back to dust.
i left my body rotting in a prairie paradise,
here it decays to gray
under the bruised indigo sky.

a ghost writes her poem in silence, in small, made-up synapses,
and the wind sweeps it away.

From within
the confines
of his
solitary
dwelling,
the Raven
gazes outward
through
barred
windows.
The sky is
but
a
distant
memory
now;
the warden
has him
under lock
and key.
His
wings
have long
since atrophied,
he misses
the sand,
the wind,
the cerulean sea.

The passage
of time
has become
meaningless
for
the Raven,
with each
insipid day
melding into
a disorientation
so atrociously
grey.
Through
the pale,
two moonlight orbs
gaze back;
the ebon figure
still as stone,
outside
looking in.
Free. Free.
the Raven
thinks to himself.
Would you kindly?
The Raven croaks.
Please free me.

~