theme for a blackout

a lighthouse burned today.
noosed in the breaths of the life-absorbed night, a wandering ship sunk to imminent blackened bottom.
in the strange inertia of petrified hands covering eyes, the drowning seconds surged in crippled flows and tiny explosions, clashing on the board with the deluge of a shattered chandelier. opaque sequences of space consumed themselves before the passengers' surprised eye grips. some clenched their hands into each other, others cried, others laughed like madmen.
somewhere in the midst of the death-inhaled screams, the wearied arms of a last survivor cleaved the charcoaled waves, angling on the needlelike thread between his unwieldy entrapment and tight limbs of inexistence. the fading terminus of the last burning lamp cast his spectacle with the delusion of flames on black waters.
he died by dawn, as I feared.

23.5ºS

it might have been that fickle temperature of your dreary being
or a yielding vision of wontedly-merging fragments
that stirred me to bewilder you and draw you towards my surface.
and I thought I could nimbly close my eyes before you
and fall asleep in mild threads of skin,
logical and discharged of my weighty chaos.

yet somewhere the pieces blacked out in discordance
and I quivered as if clashed by a mid-december nightmare
of a late night traveler madly knocking at the doors of my dwelling,
a dwelling I'd left a long time ago
for the shielded seclusion of my own winter.

I thought it might have been those three long nails
savagely thrust at the vertex of my spine,
burning to drag me down through erratic dark waters
to the inmost core of your silence
where hell begins
and we're stripped of skins and tongues.

but I had you there, weary and unshielded,
and thought a meager grip could cling me to your wrappings,
all succumbing, mouth, neck, skin and ribs,
dispossessed of that immersed something that entwines them
and weaves your cells in their fucked up logic.

yet it was the very angle of your eyelids
as if death itself was drifting through your lashes
that cleaved the warmth of my skin and its coherent ways,
fixing me deep down a concealed chamber
and I could only back away in defense
from you and your nervy december limbo.

intermission

I said tonight I wanted to be air again,
the red has etched me to racking sections.
by dusk the assailants will be marching home
and long tired breaths will absorb the charcoaled radius,
where I will walk open through the wreckage,
backwards like a chimera in a deaden movie scene
contemplating its petrified avatars
strewn in dissevered quotas all across the compass,
interspersed,
plagued,
lacerated,
like blacked out chess pieces on a bloodstained board.
my eyes, vermilion and stripped of lids,
my mouth, corpselike and desert,
my throat, numb and wedged with embers.
a blood ingrained nail,
a severed arm,
an ear,
two,
three,
four,
my awareness, hardened to endemic edges,
my memory, punctured by arrays of scalpels,
my logic, consumed by its own weight,
my aims, naked and aguing.
I close the door and they dispel like luster.

in my dream I'll step into a vacant room,
denuded shadow with half-closed eyes.
the neon lights will have been long time shut,
all faces swallowed in muted penumbra,
and words will float around me somehow mangled
that they'll no longer impair my feet like glass.
 
there, next to an opaque window,
my monster and I will sit side by side,
like silhouettes in contre-jour,
disarmed to each other through distant gazes
and conjured in a mutual sealing silence.

my goodness, I haven't slept in months...