“Dear Loneliness”

Dear Loneliness,

You are an angel, nocturnal, ambient creature, covered in leopard skin, long teeth, waterfall legs and come into my bed,

A wolfsbane and shadow heart - playing your tendril fingers as a minstrel’s harp, velvet-tassled accordion arms, a tongue

That hangs, climbs down brick buildings as vine moss; angular-a drunk on angry incense of sandalwood and gardenias,

Your hair sits atop a flower of Castellan empire, your caresses become castles and limericks of cinnamon, spice, torments

Of obsidian yarn longer than the book of Genesis, you are beautiful the way termites fester themselves beneath tiles of

Linoleum, seraphic and limbs that go higher than the Hagia Sophia and her spires, to fill my heart with but obsequious

Darts of crushed iron, spools of fiberglass that fragment my lungs, only without your love, I’ve become a parchment of

Rust written in silver marker and laminated with oiled rubber, for I have thought how deepest of desire you are, always

There when no one else comes around, how I’ve learned to love you despite myself and the shallows of wallows within

Myself, because time has treated you endlessly well. In my discovery of humanity, hidden in a darkened, ripened fruit

And from the pit of its nectar - flesh harvested from solitude, I have beget and resigned to realize, you have been living

Countenance within my thoughts and failures, for all of the world and her pleasures have only taught me to never listen

But pray for another minute here, to chase that embittered, gentle, brittle and disconnected passion along my ear, as I

Wonder if anyone is out there. The way you call as a siren in psalms, your alabaster palms, clicking tongue as if a cuckoo

Clock or wooden fabrications of mechanical cogs, she flutters her eyebrows of tinctured witch hazel, ivory encasement,

Eye color so loud it sings of choral discordance, his long-pointy ears that mimic elves with sanguine bouillards between

Rows of carnivorous mouths, its pietistic brocades of wunderwelt and pink bismuth, within entropic sublimation, your

Wings are like clear linen sheets opening up to a breeze of doves and cancer, a lowly girl you are just like me, yet, it is of

People as I who seem unable to escape your ways, allure, vitriolic whispers, raiments of declivity and carnations, buccolic

Folk dances and paraffins sequestered to the back of wild horses tethering their carriages, for your cherry water has gone

Insipid, incredulously awash virulent and antiseptic into my guts is both acid and preservative, carcinogenic and holistic,

Because when I talk to no one but your majesty’s universe do she listen of unblessed fevers and favor, spindling isolation,

Like a lone crab who grabs onto a beach rock with his pincers and does not know the meaning of what is the Parthenon

Or Stonehenge, the way it might not have a clue to what is bebop jazz music or Miles Davis, or the tales of Ophelia for

Lady Olympias, no fear of hell or the greater-expanding sun that will engulf our little blue dot. I have fallen in-love with

Your presence, the same way a hostage loves their ransom, a patient to the cure, an alcoholic loves sugar. No matter how

Many times I’ve seen you throughout the years, without fear, you have always returned to tend, mend my mendacity

With but a lividity in how you lash and erode my romanticism, how you jest with indemnity while I falter along obtuse

Merit, starving for the carnal and bringing me nothing but emptiness betwixt of iron and iodized sea salt, my heart can

Only touch so much of your aura and ardor, your benevolent legs which find my way into this or that bedroom, how I

Have no time for anything substantial, yet you dare anyhow if-pestilential, an open wound mercurial atop this piece of

Broken rosetta stone, how I long for your attentions to manifest into a tangible set of eyes or hands, how I beseech you

The way a clown garners laughs at their own expense; my hair is so different, but without mirror reflection, I will never

See if you care, because you are a selfish, vile, repugnant, indolent creature with wings of a demon and eyes of a child, a

Face of her lady of Orleans and the tongue of a viper, teeth of a raptor, but with fingernails of a painter, skinny toes of a

Runner who drinks their breakfast and knees inversed to that of a Sphinx or jaguar. But, I’ve grown, as the pain of living

Continues, so also, in this air becoming asbestos, swimming in the torpidity of digital testament into mendicants, their

Apatheistic admonishment, the plastic is the ocean how the concrete becomes forest, how the past buries my soul in an

Inkwell dried to a sludge of ermine and groundswell, so too does the future loom to those of us left with something but

Sensitive-precious-sky-fearing hearts of vestibular tubing, how our lack of providence is but not virtue, but meaningless

Torment, working hard to survive and in the end forgotten, your name sears onto my card, I swing-sing greatly, sweetly

For justice and mercy in your honor, oh spare me the nonsense of living just to be in love, give me an hour to fall, and

To feel young as I am but was to live forever in your arms, crack my ribs to create Adam into Babylon, for now childless

I rear only thoughts to those unlucky to hear them, but I am dreaming aloud-being one with you who gives me nothing

But myself, and to it I dance in your celebration, banging on pots and pans full of melted licorice, a burgundy liquid

Tropic as it is insipid, to languish in your reciprocity and avidity is to swim in the heavens’ waters, a halo worth of but

Rum and deviltry, a devil’s sophistry, nomadic bronzed skin like Romani, you have shown me so much that I am unable

To smile and truthfully say that tomorrow seems a brighter day, I cannot expel what isn’t inside myself, for it the things

I’ve always yearned most is what they say must be awaited. Dear mistress of internal numbness and disarray, you touch I

As I am but an adolescent myself without guardianship, for I am-down a stream dilatory of not only dreams but without

Consciousness, for how it feels to be your child is exactly how it felt like then, when but nothing armed of prayer and of

Foolish endearment, wanted-needed nothing more but to be found out, and though tears themselves weren’t of intrinsic

Value on their own, I had your arms to find a siren’s song. It’s been so long, marigold locks of burnt umber catechism,

Mired by lymphatic tunnel vision, a garbage estuary driven to candelabras of Mars and Aurora Borealis, you are callous,

Inconsiderate, a whisper of my own hatred and judgement, though your peridot gavel fit for a pharisee invokes a Moses

In me, to demure your scepter, moonlit skin-like the surface of Uranus or the rings of Saturn, my lords are not my own

But the revelry and gentility you expunge onto my skin as you kiss my forehead as if a friend and tell that I’d better off

As perish, for which your parish we sift rushing mudwater through our fingers like meshed baskets fishing for gemstone,

How you deride my harmony upon the airs of pretension - you love somebody, anybody, but to it there isn’t someone in

Your reflection, a subsistent, solicitous, soliloquy of chance and circumstance, clothed napkin of strawberry dot stitching

A Tuscan sunset betrothed a mortar and pestle farm made of porcelain dolls, a potpourri of charmless rock and pewter

Cross, indignities are my umbrage, like the voluptuous servitude of emptiness on the heels of quarries made by nameless

Brethren, I am subservient to your talents, oh mistress, mother of unspoken disease fornicated into displeasurement for

Tonight, may our cabalistic duologue of shellfire remain incorrigible, becalmed in its sacristy and parsimonious colors,

-Dear Loneliness

© 2022, A. M. D’Angelo