You style yourself an artist.

All you create is beauty.

Then what of me?

You created me.

Robbed my of my life,

threw me forlorn into eternity.

I too am your creation.

Tormented, reviled, abandoned.

What true artist scorns his own work so?

They say the devil

mixes lies and truth

to confuse the innocent soul.

Isn't that what you did to me?

Poured forth sweet words,

lies true enough to entrance.

A honeyed tongue's poison.

Poor fool, I listened.

Drawn into your world,

I cannot escape.

There are no pairs.

All stand alone.

Contraries exist, but not

in perfect sets of opposition.

No love vs. hate

No good vs. evil

No body vs. soul

No black vs. white.

These are screens,

Carefully wrought diversions,

obscuring the patterns of eternity.

How can we see the truth

While engrossed elsewhere,

dividing and categorizing existence?

Maybe it was something in the blood.

Imbibed at conception…

The strain of poetry under translucent skin.

Lonely, painful, some abscess of the soul

Bursting forth, inelegant, but real.

I am a shadow, conceived by your hate.

Blurry in your presence, never alone.

I am a shadow, born of your beauty.

Pale in comparison, never enough.

I am a shadow, harmed by your actions.

I follow your footsteps, never to die.

Grasping for the sublime

Something I know I cannot hold

Snowflake lace on a summer day

A dream on the night's awakening.

Impossible; but without the quest

Nothing matters.

Eternity is beautiful with distance.

Poets long for it, painters strive all their lives

To create permanence from a moment in time.

Art commemorates what it can never fully know.

Look full at eternity, a hole of inky black,

The eye socket of a grinning skull.

Where is the point

In seeing and dreaming

When I cannot share?

Words fail.

A toothpick

To build a bridge.

Images are worse.

Hands too clumsy to sign,

To sketch.

Trapped in a world with no way out.

And no way in.

No life after death. After death.

The emptiness I awaited before

yawns again, calling me. No voice.

I believe in monsters, not religion.

Not expecting heaven or hell.

Hell is here, we are the devils.

Caine. Ancient religion of our kind.

More years, more lies, than the others.

A way to explain, to . . . console,

as we are more than any others,

children lost, trapped in the dark.