There’s a raven upon my shoulder


I’m sitting here thinking about
All the times I’ve hurt
The times where pain was the only thing
I could taste
How reality bites till teeth lick blood
How reality never plays around
Doesn’t know how to
Like when you get to the point where open eyes
See the death of fables
Where your no longer innocent and able
Where truth becomes a label
You stick on things
To make them real

When the first gentle kiss becomes a feverish
Tongue shoving meat through chafed and cracked lips
Not enough water in the well maybe
Or just maybe couldn’t see past the veneer
hadn’t learned how to yet
still rosey pink tints to everything

but the first time I saw scars on her tits,
I cried, realized, everything’s inflated
A blown out proportion
Of circumstance,
How chances are moments, choices
That slip between the cracks
Eyes diluted with drugs that never had a name,
Never needed one
When heartbeats skip past the opportunity
When they’ve already turned to a memory
Before your hand can even leave the holster
And how the paint brush your parents paint with
Is just a smile in rewind
The sound of a whip
That licks the air between your breast
And a mother’s womb,
How once your out,
You can never go back,
How the chasm, the cliff edge,
Expands, grows larger,
The years adding wrinkles,
Weakening morals

They say gray hair is a symbol
For wisdom, but what they don’t say means more
How it’s just stress breaking bones
Jangled nerves to hot tip needles
Extending from brittle veins
When the fable becomes your label
To stick on things
Cause your no longer good at lying,
No reserves left for trying
Even self-immolated death
Requires too much sweat

So I pick up the pieces
The broken bones
The gentle kisses
The dry cracked lips
I wish to atone for
Sink teeth to self exposed flesh
Bite until jaw lines meet
Chew until memories keel over
Till the pain recedes
Like a drug, like a dog’s bark
Echoing then fading into hollow eyes,
Soft sad still moments of compromise
To all the merry go rounds
The santas with beards falling to pillow case stomachs
To it all melting into mists of forget me nots

I suck in hanging gut
Spit out misery
Pick up my chain heavy garments
Move out past it all
Till the shade trails the shadow
Till flits of flaming sun
Have compensated for where the gun has shot
Bullet hole chest
Where the wound has peeled back and
Exposed brittle skeletal remains
Ghost child fire walks
My feet wandering past the sillowhettes
The richochets of burning dreams
The whale song of bitter seas
Till I reach the end of the cuts
The enflamed flesh
Reach over the chasm
The cliff edge
Roar into song heavy wind

“I will not Surrender!!!”
“I will not Surrender!!!’

thin walls,
circling, spiraling
enclosing
chewed over stomach spears
entwining child throat
exiting infant fostered mouth
chunks of pain and misery
jilted pieces of love
emptied out to collapsed scar toughened knees
pooling around heart strings
and whispers to myself, pleading

“Please, no more, please, no more……I’ve had enough…”

Eyes seeping shut with whisps of once upon a times
And fables that were real way back when
Till the eyes fill with sand
And say

“Go to sleep young child. Go to sleep and dream.”

And I do sleep
I do dream
And I fall
I fall
Till my skin has grown colder
And Ravens rest upon my shoulder