Zahava

Some things are meant to be held Like smooth stones; Idly turned over and forgotten As soon as their weight leaves your palm— Until light catches the flecks of mica Lining the furrows of your hands.

It is a slow drift— Tectonic The creep of continents along A deep ocean ridge Or the wobble of a planet slowly Spun out from its sun Into endless night. The breath beneath a whisper Until their hand drops from your fingers And their scent sloughs from your skin Your slow-burning heart gone supernova To snuff out an empty universe Fit only to be flattened, folded And forgotten In some anteroom of the heart.

This one's for us: The barrel-scrapers, the bottom-dwellers, Sucker-punched by Sappho's Aphrodite And flicked away like ash, Our glowing red hearts ground out. We toss down our bitterness, Swallow our sorrow Until we can no longer stand, From the first breath to the last note, Long and wailing That bends and curls up into the air Like cigarette smoke that hovers in halos Around our heads.

I've lost track.  The steps, the minutes, the seconds have all run over the rim of my mind, streaming down the tunnel ahead.  The last pinhole of light faded away long, long ago.  Hours.  Days.  Years.  The spin of the sun is not important here: the only thing is important is to keep moving forward, to fill the grooves worn by so many feet before, through this cave that runs like a vein to the heart of the earth.  Down and down and down. I have gone very deep.  Past the rows of fat-filled lamps that jumped and sputtered as I passed, past the lotus-legged acolytes

Give not your body— Skin and bone and sinew will not satisfy. Give not your mind— That lightning storm inside your skull Will hardly stir her atmosphere. Instead, take your heart, Rich and red and shining And place it at the feet of the Black-eyed, sharp-toothed goddess of love and war To devour; And lie at her feet as she feeds you embers To fill the space.

Everything is broken They are slivers, they are shards, they are pieces-- Pebbles on a beach that are chips of a continent Ground into nothing By the ceaseless beating Of waves And weather And time.

There are words to push against the darkness To roar against the thousand forms Of that black and starless night Sprung fully formed from our cloven skulls. But first we must Open our eyes and descend To slay that many-toothed monster With our naked hands, Choose— To drink its blood like venom wine And be overcome, Or follow that golden thread Fragile between our fingertips That pulls us towards the sun.

I'd start tomorrow; The thing is that tomorrow Never comes around.

My Cynical Valentine Hooooboy. Great.  Valentine's Day. I'm not jealous, really, I'm not. I usually spend it alone. Actually, I'm perfectly happy that way. All the slasher movies are empty. What kind of idiot would take his girlfriend to a Slasher movie on the 'most romantic day of the year'? …yeah, I know, I can think of a few too. Let's forget about them for a minute. See, the real problem with Valentine's Day Is dealing with everyone else. There's so much friggin' sugar and confetti And pinkness and sparkles and hearts That I want to throw up a kidney or something. Because everyone knows That within the next two weeks Hal

 She had been walking a long time.  How long, she did not know.  The sky was a thick soupy grey, turning what would have been sun into nothing more than the absence of darkness, and it had begun to rain.  The air was hazy; the raindrops were too insubstantial to fall to earth on their own, so they hung in the air, caressing her skin, clinging to her hair and being buffeted by her breath.  She padded along in the grass, barefoot.  Perhaps she had lost her shoes, or perhaps she simply had none at all.  She didn't remember.  It felt as though her brain had been wrapped in a particularly painful kind of cotton wool, and despite her efforts, she h