Blackest black-purple

my voice returns to me

dragging shackles.

What vertebrate ghost did this?

A legacy of ice floes through

my life

High tea in hell.

They look so refined.

I close the broken window.

The wind turns back.

After the fire

ash sifts through the air

looking for something left

to land on

finds only my hollow hands.

My voice climbs over my tongue as

a weary and alien being.

My artistically rendered

silence leaks from my nailbeds.

The sky is black,

black purple,

and I am invaded.

In some paisley antithesis

to paradise

a swan defaults on her loan.

When water is rented

and love is leased,

how can we have enough

spoons to gnaw our way through

magnified day?

In the kitchen,

patience burns tea

while virtue gets drunk on

the last of my Italian wine.

The swan will not leave the bank.

Her babies are buried there.

Below an investing, rippled surface,

a fish surveys the

inescapable purveyors of loss.