Sex, Love, and Mortal Kombat

I made the mistake of looking at her picture
Flowing tides of black lace swam on slender shoulders
Eyes lost, tragic pools of green and gorgeous anguish
Face still bleeding from the scabs she tore and ravaged
Streaks of crimson rimmed a smile lush and passionate.
Screaming human truth and frailty until I, too,
Needed to watch something bleed.
A friendly voice intrudes upon me
Offering challenge, and a less drastic violence.
“I love Mortal Kombat,” he says casually,
Sipping a beer and daring me to smile.
A simpler love, and yet less hurtful
Two characters that dance entwined in mutilation
Two minds finding their joy in mutual destruction.
B-B-Right C-Top C-A
“I love this game.”
Punch-Elbow-Knee-Kick-Backfist.
“I loved her.”
Kiss-Lies-Claws-Orgasm.
Spinning, dizzied, life-gauged depleting,
A picture glimmers in the television’s glassy surface
And though the battle’s lost, a warrior
Has only begun to bleed.
You play the game, proclaiming all the while to love it
But in a year, you’ll buy the sequel, learn to use a newer character
Make him move and dance and bleed and vanquish foes for your twisted,
Selfish sense of beauty and satisfaction
While an old, forgotten cartridge
Rots upon the table ‘neath a vodka glass.
“Fatality.”

Assassin of the Cloudless Sky

I returned in triumph to the desert
And found it to be raining.
As the cool, refreshing moisture bathed my flesh
I found my happiness in question.
Does the desert cry for lack of rain?
Or does our deepest misery misplace itself
Beneath the veil of some more noticed deficit?
“I am unhappy,” speaks the masked assassin
As we project his blame unto disguises
Fearing beyond fear to look upon the face of sorrow
And so does anguish stalk our fumbling herds unseen
While we point frightened fingers at a cloudless sky
With none to recognize the dagger’s bite,
We blame our agony and blood loss
On a lack of rain.

Twilight’s Cadence and the Thousand Eyes

I saw her soaring ‘cross the lake of life
This Dragonfly for whom all poets wept
Her fragile beauty spoke the visions of a thousand seeking eyes
And sang to me as many soothing notes
A twilit harmony for cosmic insects.

The gentle drone of wings that fought for air
Against the very sky
Had wrought a lullaby,
Which earned soul’s complacency by virtue
Of it’s struggle’s beauty.

Time passed, while many notes of ecstasy escaped our lips
And with each visit to the lakeside I became convinced
Of my deepest inability
To imagine it without her

Now many sins have flown like stones between us
Twilight’s promise broken by the fires of dawn
She in lust, and I in anger
Forsook love’s lofty flight
And spiraled headlong into wicked acts and darkened karmas

I know the evil in your soul -
Gentle lover, your wrath and mine yet circle,
Promethean vultures, stalking hungrily toward vengeful prophets
Insight dusts the scrying crystal of tomorrow – do you see them feasting?

Know this – a thousand eyes have shown the beauty in a tragic universe
While transience and transitivity foretell the tragedy in beauty
These visions yet remain in harmony.

As the end of it all, just as the beginning saw
My Dragonfly
Is but an insect.
And these thousand eyes
Seeing vultures to be phoenixes
Will shed their tears in memory alone.

To The Magdalene

Tones of dusk beset the hill Golgotha
Where saviors sink and beg the earth to mourn
Looking up, up toward the gently weeping
From down beneath the demon’s lashing scourge

We ask ourselves, forsaken yet salvific
Have we not by our constitution earned
Like iron swords that cry in infant innocence
The joy of pain – the right to burn?