Vigil
Nightshade trails beneath my fingers,
mingles with starshine upon the water,
in the umbered slick of bogs.
Urgent thoughts pressing against my skull:
writhing moths seeking your illumination.
I am called, by your longing or mine;
Why must I always give it voice?
You invoke within me
desperate cries in the wakeful silence.
The late hour laughs at our passion,
My helplessness, hapless irony
And beckons me forth to fill your absence
With vigils in swamps.

Elegy
The little deaths which comprise our lives at both ends of disappointment
Unmarked graves number or excuse compromise and discontent

I had no warning in a heart with hope warring, as though I would dissent
Youth has the years and luxury of folly later to repent

The scent of flesh hangs between us lightning seared pungent
My heathen tears drip blindly heedless of your intent

And so the minutes fall like arrows without you, and neither relent
I am forsaken in this sunken garden as statuary struggles silent

The release of what had me caught leaves me falsely despondent
Even thus abandoned I would not revoke consent

Cassandra in the Carnage
I think I saw Troy burning
behind that last ridge.
I've fallen asleep
at the wheel of a wooden horse.
Fate, a simple mechanism,
Arriving without my revelation.

Relating
When we in nights unslept,
crawled through the wreckage of dreams,
and found and left each other--
to a private pain,
a communal dissatisfaction,
and obliterating darkness.