Seed 1

 Just feel numb

for one moment.

And maybe two,

or even three.

You've earned this calculated demise.

The strength you've built - 

...

; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

eNORMOUS.

Unquantifiable. 

------

I'm sowing seeds. 

If you're this deep, you likely already understand. 

You'll find it in 12-14 years.

Find seed 2

Sub-Merge

Tied up, 
breathing slow,
rope bristle burns the ankles as the body is lowered head first into a tank of warm water.

An embracing grasp,
a gentle suffocation,
an innominate pleasure
as you rhyme yourself with deafening aqua, submerged,
only hearing your hearing go heatedly blue,
only feeling your feelings mesh weightlessly tender
into a fluid envelope addressed nowhere, but close.
Close to the edge,
drawn electrified toward the edge.

Fear excites a bolt of panic, blooming here at the edge
where there's no more breath to take.
The drowning moment totally engulfs
and relinquished control succumbs you in its night's sky...

...but we are relieved at its brink.

The senses flood back like stark realizations
as you are retrieved from your chamber of inundation
and your soaked skin is clawed by air that shivers over your shaking self,
dripping as the ropes are severed, gasping.

Alive closest to death,
the climax at the tollbooth.

Windswept pt. 3

Malice in the sun's gleam,
blinding off of ponds and rocky surfaces alike,
from an ironically guiding institution,
eternal.
The night stars inspire more trust;
heavenly circuitry.

Nerves of fire, they persist,
winking from the nether.

Instinct in the sky.
Learn to trust these, maybe.

Bare, tender feet ache to meet the atmosphere.

Reddish, cracked cushion
with darker, firm exterior;
trudging over scaly mud.

The wind blows
and the nausea of letting go pangs,
but there is height on the horizon.

Every step elevating,
memory's breath excavating
ropes that burn while toward them, reining,
still on, forward, my soles take me.

Big pictures melt into finer details the closer you get,
not entirely dislike grey slush hardening into concrete;
closing the distance on a mountain.

Jutting skyward
at the cusp of rock and ground,
the wisely weathered mountain's face.

Exhausted to the point of numb preparation,
I begin ascent.

The higher I trek, the more ferocious the wind coldly screams,
wailing directionless,
into ringing ears that no longer hear
and over worn skin that barely feels.

On the snow-capped summit, nothing but a view.
My mind returns to seeing the shore from the ocean,
now thankful for a different perspective.

Windswept pt. 2

Thorny vines strangled their way out of cavities in the ground,
to lethargic vision, almost throbbing;
a verdant abscess.

Exposed roots weaved in and out of pit walls
like dolphins restricted to the waterway of a canal,
trapped.

I solemnly grit my teeth,
sorrow and anger bearing a bastard child without name.

This was land?

Flared nostrils bit the sickly scent of soggy leaves.
Had the winds wept sometime during my lost sojourn?

Flogging forward,
the landscape persists.
Keeping the wind at my back,
my only direction,
even on ground.

Endless creviced overgrowth...
we've been here before.
The wind's running me in circles.

Routing myself against it, exactly,
would yield only the same result.

Through warm, aching eyelids
the inevitable realization leaked
out as streamed consciousness:
I must bear my own way.

Windswept pt. 1

Infectious gusts delivered direction,
sailing.

From warm, southern coasts
of comfort and safety
to treacherous ice-piked banks
birthing uncertainty.
It seemed we could go anywhere.
We would go everywhere.

Soft airs exhaled by nature herself
on blemished cheeks
that extend with every savored breath,
every taste of tree bark hope
that we'd arrive shortly to land,
rosy quartz in my eyes.

Alternatively, choking
on freezing, bellowing realization
that the wind blows aimless.

Every place, I believed desired.
Every place, a destination,
though I never set foot on any shores,
only viewing them from my transport.

Thus, never grounded,
fearing decommission of my windmill self
that absolutely needs,
with all-consuming wrath,
even a slight breeze to automate.

Those were my feelings,
melded into belief.

Why, then, does the wind blow?
If it has intent, when?
And for whom?
How can I please it,
and by what means?

I already know where it's taken me,
but I now step off.

Listerine

Conventional mouth wash,
spearmint preference,
swishing it had never happened,
forgets that mourning breath.

Reaching where old brushes couldn't,
tidal waves of cleansing
gush over filled cavities,
a temporary fix of
freshening dignity.

Not returning to where one's been,
rather, masking what always is, though.

It's the food that leaves what rots your teeth,
and the brush that cleans it up.
It's the Listerine that fills what the brush missed,
but it's the water that never was
a culprit.

Of water,
erosion of your gnashing bones,
like a stream smoothing stone,
is the only plausible effect.

Rivers, a beautiful blemish anyway.

Cauldron

Leaves slowly caressing Northern winds,
flecked in the distance,
gently veiling a puppeteered cauldron
resting under a kind, Fall branch canopy.

Victim to a whisk of many disembodied, ethereal hands,
it sickly emits a verdant glow.

It's chill, but contents are hot;
a snowball filled with fire.

Beneath the soil it sits,
a network of retired roots,
Roman aqueducts,
wet only by the cauldron's sloshing, nauseous overspill,
shuddered out in spasm.

Drowning to the sound of a sitar,
heavy, smoke-suffocated agents are tossed in by those hands,
carelessly stewing despair.

Lofty branches have lost everything,
leaves all gone to the sugar-scented breeze
and the cauldron's no longer veiled,
not even gently.

Uncontainable boiling and fervent pressure are, over time, enough.
And as volcanoes erupt,
geysers outward the contents when they become too much.
And all the hands scatter,
except the tender palms propping it back up.