Kissing A Rose

Kissing A Rose

There blooms within a sultry blackness
A flower quite immune to darkness
A blossom that a lover chose
For here there blooms a hidden rose

Scarlet petals flushing deeper
Like maiden blushes, climbing steeper
Crimson edges gaping like jaws
Petals grasping out like claws

I have kissed the hands of men
And made many a curtsy to them
Still, when I kissed this secret rose
Twas then I knew which path I chose

It parted scarlet lips in time
And pressed them close again to mine
It's maiden blush showed no desire
Tho' still the petals' pulse grew higher

Deep within a darkened cave
Lurks a bloom no sun can save
Were you to kiss this rose you'd slowly lose your mind
But still no sweeter beauty could you find

Its inner bud calls out so sweet
Hid 'neath scarlet lips so deep
To kiss these petals many would die
And never think to wonder why

Still open are its crimson lips
And from its centre darkness slips
This flower that a lover chose
So still I kiss this unearthly rose

The Moon And The Sea

The Moon And The Sea

The sea is growing cold
Beneath a pining moon
That sickens for her love
For he is growing old

Flighty and entranced
She pleads with silver eyes
Drenched in youthful tears
She begs a silent dance

And cries the silver sea
To his uncertain love
That never could he adore
One less radiant than she

But still she fears he strays
When she hides from the sky
She fears the Earth's embrace
On all his sleepless days

He sobs that he is true
And could love none but she
Tho' still she cries to him
"Your love grows strange to me

For when we are apart,
You swear you weep and moan
But when I pull you close,
Icy is your heart"

He gazes to her seat
Within the lofty sky
Where she is kept aloof
And never feels his heat

He cries his love in pain
Up to his frigid maid
And roils in passion'd storms
Of teardrops and of rain

And so on goes the tide
Through every passing year
They sing their sordid tune
Whene'er the moon is pale

The Suicide Note

The Suicide Note


To whom it may concern-

Today I am going to kill myself. It is very likely that by the time you have found this letter, I will already be dead. I write these first few sentences to you, simply out of obligation, for I have read and heard too many times that this is how one should write a suicide note. I would wonder how the tradition got started, but I haven't the time or the paper. But I digress. I have thought long and hard about how I would do it, if I could find the courage. I could jump of a building, but I would wonder whether it would be the fall or the impact that killed me. I could slash my wrists, but that would be uncommonly messy. Besides which, I hate knives. So I have resolved that I am going to poison myself. Our house is old, filled with all manner of creatures that should be poisoned lest they gnaw away its foundations, leaving it to crumble. I have become another nibbling rat to this world, and I must be poisoned.
This seems as good a time as any to explain my reasoning for this action. I was born to parents who were extremely good at hiding anything in their lives that did not feed their self image as straight-laced and well off. I was such a thing to be hidden, for although I was born a man, I never knew to which, if any, gender I belonged. I hid myself from them, as much as humanly possible, and on my seventeenth birthday, the seventh of September, I slipped out of the house with what money I had and my few treasured possessions. I heard later that they had tried to look for me, but given up once they realised the benefits of my disappearance.
I left the Stepford Wives world I had grown up in, hitchhiking my way to the coast, for I had always had a love of the sea. I always thought I should like to die at sea, my lover standing on the shore waiting for news of my ship, only to hear that it had gone down with all hands. But this is a romantic death, one that glosses over the actual dying, and focuses more on the reactions and plight of the living. For I have heard of the pain of drowning. I have heard tales of it, where the man who told the tale mimed a horrendous puppetry of flailing limbs and gasping faces, a ship crushing those inside her, in a perfidious display of sickly poetic doom. But again, I have diverted my story.
When I reached the coast, I found myself lodgings by the sea, a dreadful old flophouse in which there was the perpetual scent of wine and French perfume. I couldn't afford even this slum on my own, so I befriended a tenant there named Dorian. Dorian was like a god in that cheap puppet-show world, his cold and spidery fingers gently and artfully manipulating their strings. He had the face of Lucifer as painted by an angel, his dark, curling hair and curved nose so perfect I thought he could have been a statue. His eyes were icy blue, a stark contrast to his swarthy face, a face so beautiful it could have been a goddess's. There was Gypsy blood in him, they said, and they had taught him the arts of being both a man and a woman. I lived with him for months, never asking more than a crust of bread and a blanket by the fire, and he came to appreciate my company, for as he said, the sea is a quiet mistress.
Dorian was a sailor, of the poetic and often tragic variety. He would be gone for weeks at a time, leaving me to watch our dingy room in the flophouse by the sea. When he returned, we would sit by the sputtering fire, and he would take me in his arms and tell me tales of the places he had been. He spoke of India, and spices and beautiful women with skin like night, he spoke of the mermaids that had claimed his fellows and sunk them beneath the waves, never to be seen again. He told me of Africa, with its vast plains and majestic peaks, and I sat, enchanted, as he wove a tapestry of words that brought me ever closer to him.
Mine is not a romantic tale, but Dorian's was. So it was fitting that he should meet his end in a romantic fashion. He drowned at sea, when his ship went down with all hands. It seemed to me a cruel joke, for how many times had I stood on the docks like Desdemona, waiting for my Othello to return, dreaming that someday I would be the Othello, and he would long for my return. I had lost Dorian the way I had hoped to be lost myself, but I was the one standing on the sands of a mighty and unforgiving sea, casting roses to the waves.
After Dorian's death, I could no longer stay in the room by the sea. I left it, taking his coat and handkerchief as well as my own heavy heart with me. I wandered the barren coast for months, sleeping in cheap inns and with rich old men in return for a few coins to buy bread. Those months were lonely, cold and desolate, for I never forgot him, my sailor with Gypsy blood in him and a thousand tales. His memory clung to my dreams and waking thoughts, leaving me shuddering with tears.
A good while later, I found a room at last, and the old woman who ran the boarding house was kind, and asked me no questions of who I was or where I had come from. I stayed there for a year, living off my work as an errand boy for a printer's shop, and for a while I was happy, though Dorian's face was still imprinted in my heart.
When I left that boarding house, I was twenty-one years old, had not a lot of money, and I returned to the sea. I returned to the room that Dorian and I had shared, and sat by the dingy fireplace, which I left unfilled by flame, for had I lit a fire, I would have shuddered with cold, for his arms were not there to keep me warm. I would stay in that room the rest of my life, which is not much longer now. For I sit by the empty grate, huddled in a blanket and his jacket, writing my tale so that I shall not have been thought to have drunk myself to death or some other nonsense. I have stolen some rat poison from the landlady, and she will never miss it. Thus, I bid you all farewell, for I must join my Othello beyond the misty sea. I would hope you do not think me a fool, but if that is all I have conveyed to you, then so be it. Goodbye, gentle reader. If ever you tell my tale, tell it well, and I shall smile upon you from the lands beyond the sea. Goodbye.

Seven White Birds

Seven White Birds

Seven white birds, flying overhead
Seven white birds, eyes of black and blood so red
Seven white birds, one will soon be dead

Six white birds, with a sweet sad song
Six white birds, their life is not so long
Six white birds, one will soon be gone

Five white birds, press on ever more
Five white birds, shadows on the floor
Five white birds, one must reach the final shore

Four white birds, grieving for the fallen sun
Four white birds, singing out that day is done
Four white birds, now one's final course has run

Three white birds, black against a dawn
Three white birds, shadows on the lawn
Three white birds, only two will linger on

Two white birds, with soft black eyes that weep
Two white birds, fly over mountains steep
Two white birds, one more must the darkness keep

One white bird, singing a last refrain
One white bird, singing to the rain
One white bird, soon the last shall darkness claim

No white birds, flying overhead
No white birds, with eyes so black and blood so red
No white birds, for now the last of them is dead

The Dying Highwayman's Song

The Dying Highwayman's Song

Let me sing you my song, gentle stranger
Let me tell you my tale, and tell it true
I'm dying this night, upon the cold clay
And I've only a while left to tell it to you

I used to go dashing alone in the night
I was a rider, a highwayman bold
I stole from those fattened by lives of excess
But now I am dying, my blood it grows cold

My blood it grows cold, no longer heated
By the pulse of my heart, and the love of a girl
The daughter of a man most most harsh and cruel
Who locked his daughter away from the world

He locked her away, her ardour to cool
Her lust for her life, her passion for me
There she stayed locked for all too many years
And I longed for her, and she longed for me

I climbed to her window from the streets below
And there she swore her heart to me
She swore her love, and I swore mine
And I pledged her I would set her free

I rode to her window one cold midnight
And called out her name, and cast her a rope
She came to the window, and cast down a rose
I saw my love, and she her last hope

She climbed to my arms, and mounted my steed
And away into the night we swiftly rode
Then came a shot from her father's house
And I fell from my horse, and lay in the road

My lover fled far, my horse riding fast
I bled in the street, as she fled the town
I called out her name, and she never turned
And so to the ground I cast her last rose

I cursed her, and the love that she bore
I cursed the way she left me to die
I cursed her father's bullet in my flesh
I cursed her fair skin, I cursed her blue eyes

I slumped to the pavement, my blood growing cold
My tears running over my wound, and they stung
My one last comfort in my time of death
Was, were I not shot, they would have me be hung

Now at last my tale is at an end, gentle stranger
I must ride my last to the gates of Hell
For I died in shame, in my lover's scorn
But tell my tale, and tell it well

Speak of me true, and speak of me well
But still no better than that which I am
That which I was, and will not be again
A lover, and a foolish highwayman