ghosts in the water.

unsettled hearts, souls left to wonder.

i have planted and left
100 gardens, gullible flowers
left to wild beds.

the tolling bell and the wrens' song.
leaves me undone, lost to the undoing.

i am the lightening storm,
           this electric swarm.

promises and lies,
shouted truth and whispered story.

the killers come and they are not quiet,
in their gentleman's quest,
they are leather-bound and painted,
kissing steel and lead,
crosses and old bones.

you know them by the names they call themselves:

healer, lover, husband, priest, shaman, leader.
heedless and headless and ruled by slander.

but i am the great mitigator.

your protector from the sun, the insane light,
the surging radiation,
from the cold, deep reaching fingers
of oxygen(less) space.

i am the opposite of your medicine traditions.

i am the only god you truly know.

you see me everyday, you have grown use to me,
you do not know me for the wild thing i was born to be.

you abuse me in your desperation to be King.
to out run and over take your mortality.

and so, i crown you King,
       of nothing.

as you wish, so be it.

in your own extinction, you take from me
some shred of your own destiny.

and for this moment, i am marked by you.
this chapter in my story, defined by you.

but all in all.




you are a tattoo, painful
now when fresh but soon
to fade.

i cannot know what will be next,

i will lie fallow while
your bones become the

stardust haze of
my next beginning.