The Voices

The Law says I'm now a Man
The pictures say I'm but a Boy
I think of everything I can--
then a She says "You're just my toy."

The Inside says that I'm a Soul
Brain Research states otherwise
Leonard speaks there'll be a Call
My Friends say I'm food for mice

The Heart screams "I'm Immortal"
but betrays itself when it aches
Time creeps on sweet and subtle
waits for when it'll eat my face

Graveyards with silence choose to speak
and mutilate dreams taking flight
whichever truth I choose to seek
already muted by the blight

See, these voices roar and blow
within my ears day after day--
Terrified I just hope to know
one day what I'll choose to say.

The Truth About Humanity

Those that say humanity is
the great monuments and empires
built and destroyed, great loves, great struggles,
great literature, great sex, great faith:
you are wrong. Humanity is
a sequence of not-yet-dead men stuffing cotton
into dead men's assholes
-so that they won't shit their sheets and coffins-
and hoping to be able to shit in a toilet
for oh god just a little bit longer
until they lie flat dead on a stone
their assholes exposed and rotting.

Sakura

I am done now
learning to yearn
for things unattainable
the introduction of you
an all-sufficient instruction for me
in that regard;
I am done with the desire
to explore the whole of this world
or have the whole of this world
come explore me in awe
before either me or this world
is stuck in the ground in a coffin--
The sunken cities
that hide in the swollen seas
your large pupils swim in
is all I want to go to.
The sonatas,
the sonatas of fear and laughter and sweat
your long fingers can draw from me
all I want to hear, your fear,
your fear and laughter and sweat all the taste I want on my tongue.
you see: My heart
no longer a house for the imitations
of great things, no longer like
the cheap dusty Sacred Heart of a plastic Jesus
in another forsaken church
but a mantelpiece for your light feline sit,
that crossing, oh that soft crossing of your legs
that makes the whole of this world tremble,
and the bastard you grin like.

You Come Down From the Stage

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
fooled into a full blossom
by a treacherous March morning

you come down from the stage
utterly alone, the personas you loved,
the personas you hated--the personas that blissfully weren't you washed away,
gone, and once again there is no excuse
for this haircut that is rather a lack of a haircut
once again there is no excuse
for this face, this pitiful waste of benzoyl peroxide
and (never quite) Clean&Clear.

you come down from the stage
to an empty bed, that was all the gazes you'll have on you
for the next god knows how many months,
now you have to live with everything
the make-up remover will not take off
the hunchback of your character
exchanged with a more difficult kind of hunchback

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
that fooled itself into a full blossom
in a March morning almost like any other

ready to have its flowers
frozen and cut down by the winter
ready for nothing else,
nothing else at all.