Grand Maestro, I’ll call you this, right now in hopes that you hear me. I’ll send my prayer to you, through dream dusted night, sprinkled with true nightly terrors that we’ll never repeat to the living. Walls have stopped me from dictating this word, this single word if uttered will lead the minotaur to me. Beasts kill savagely, poetically. This violence is in the nature of the labyrinthine world. Some nights I wake myself in a panic, finding myself in a darkened room and that second before my eyes adjust to the darkness I wonder if I have gone blind and I slip into the reasoning of navigating the seas without the sun’s reflection.  It’s either my panic, my eyes, or the patron saints that give return to me the pity of sight. Will they ever one day forget to return it? You can suffocate with oxygen. You can drown without water. His footsteps are growing closer now, the bull-headed creature sent to destroy me for my vision. Part man. Part bull. Dante found him in his inferno, this monster whose entire zone is violence. His shadow creeps upon the wall now. Horns peak behind the curtain. Raging black eyes find victory in this, my fear. I call upon my saint, my savior, my only hope for survival. “I beg you to please come save me. Come find me, Borges!”

I sit at the Office of the Parting Soul From the Body
I’ve turned my face away from sin only to be drenched in it by others
Unto the wicked there shall be nightmares of my time
Leaving with nothing is easy as I am the burden to bear
No one will ask for my ashes for fear they will stain
The mistake is thought contagious, you’re my ashes to ashes
I’ll listen to no reason and I’ll walk away from the last sunset
Don’t be troubled for I’ll leave nothing to the memory of me

We open to a chapter in progress, a play in media res
The masquerade ball at Prince Prospero’s castle
Where I have danced with nobles and Red Death
The next act is tragedy, of Ophelia’s plot
And graveyard conversation with Hamlet
There’s incessant sweeping and midnight snatches
Me into the in between of wake and sleep paralysis
Shadows stand at the foot of my bed and clawed
Attempts fail and I’m followed by unknown faces
The dead sit with me and tell me their regrets
Regret comes to me, repeated obsessions
Night rolls this way, cyclical inescapable horrors

They’ve faded away, and were pressed in between two pages like a moth
Cells have dried and deteriorated without the notice of these caretakers
Remnants of their ghosts are marched through staged parade routes
Smiles are wooden, applauses are orchestrated, you have all forgotten
Music once blared on the battlefields, trumpeted drums and banners waived
Tunes roared as tears were halted by blows and bludgeoned wounds
Fall, winter, summer grasses drowned in the rust-colored life of men who cried for their home
Later the terrain changed, the purpose shifted, irrational reasons expounded

At night the jungles swell with regret and the fog that floats above the tree line
remembers the rips, the screams, the terrified starving faces who were trapped
in their home, their hell, these landscapes created centuries before as their coffins
Stars watch hidden remains tucked behind trees, tunnels, and buried in desserts and beyond

Valor is the emotion that stings while bravery is the ingredient the gods added to their
blood, blazoned their hearts with steel and lifted their souls to pedestals
For both sides have reasoned with their losses and sustained their defeat
Where have they gone, the true valiant warriors who are meant to conquer cruelty?

A man who holds anger closely at his chest for fear that it will be dropped
A man who has remained seated far too many hours in a cold, cluttered room
A man who is bewildered by what he becomes when the crowed has formed
Who has learned where the lies are hidden within concentrated apologies
This man rejoices for oblivion exists easily beyond the reaches of his door
Aware that clatters flow in from outside and these are the calls of frameless humanity
Volcanic states of purified blood mixed with the echoes of fear drive some motivation
Delicate fury rides sustained designs of wretchedness

There’s no reasoning or understanding of monsters developed from our own design
He knows to ignore the very glimmers of humility and reads you all as specimens
Mysterious happiness falls not for recollections of kindness for none exist
Gleeful demons encircle him, these are his children

Cries are the product of his success and sobs are the additional rewards
Searching for him is as simple as not recognizing him at all
One can never prophesize their own killer

I visited Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s synagogue at night as I walked to the Old Cemetery
I recall the cobble stone streets of Prague, how people watched me curiously
while I looked up at the window, shielded in shadows, fighting an urge to shout
above for whatever essence remained to come to the glass and find me

Created with the intent of defense, there is an element of sadness there
knowing you were not created to love but to destroy and your very existence
is sacrilege and man screams terrors to God when he sees your face molded of clay
your hurried anthropomorphic form given an empty life to be controlled

You were birthed in secrecy, your laboratory can be found in nightly words
whispers of the tower, and your home was destined to be that Ghetto
Do you ever walk to that window? Are you pacing those floorboards even now?
Or, were you really abandoned by your father in guilted mourning?

Those letters rest upon your forehead still and the syllables can easily be uttered
Golem, my unshaped form, you are unfinished before God’s eyes
Developed with the esoteric secrets that gave us our ancestor Adam
Your sleep is not truth in death

All of my poems this month are inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ Poems of the Night

There is a street you have walked down many times
You will never travel down this road again
Friends you have hugged months ago
Familiar eyes escape your memory

Voices that once were so familiar to you fade
Fabric taut to its limits has ripped through
Sadness is not knowing  those moments
You will fail to never live them again

Everyday strangers become your friends
Days heralded when they no longer pass
Abandoned seats on the train mark loss
Life is continuous; loss and tragedy expected

Days  were crowned by smiles were never
Failures to recapture memories tortured
Streets have changed, mapped in oddity
People have left, escaped with your moments

Curious pots of collected dark standing water
Marveled by smooth, polished obsidian
Sidon gave the coated glass of Turkey
A thin sheet of silver now coats our eyes

In the mirrored world another reality exists
Those people that pass in our moments
Sharing our realities, fixated upon us
Away, into their own cold foundations

Their movements are repeated in shadows
Slipping out of their cage, they walk among us
Manifesting within our homes as creaking doors
Tapping windows that cause violent sleep

Never trust who you seek in that cold glass
They’re more than you, a measure of things
Of moments and meanings meant to disrupt
The balances of this eternal life unraveling
Take care as you sit and stare

Not only do silent rivers and lakes provide reflection
Nor do mirrors in your crumbling, dust-covered home
You are your own symbol of distorted illumination
Weeping madness is not easily forgotten

La Oreja de Van Gogh is tortured flesh ripped from the artist
Munch suffered as well from his father’s seeds of madness
Stains that will not be scrubbed away by the supreme fates
Only words or a blood-stained brush can alleviate the sting

There are times when we can walk outside among others
Pleased we have blended Edward Hyde within the crowd
We don’t need a serum to become possessed
Our metamorphosis is involuntary

Murmurs are flitting and the images meant to dilute
Our meaning does not sustain our transformation
Darker impulses need more to cease
Death is beauty in poetry

There’s this distinction beyond all others that the pale orb that hovers above us
is an object positioned there by the gods to mark the path of our history
This disc is bolded by superstition and illuminates angels and their darkly opposite
Our justification for it is the same across all cultures ‘The moon made me do it.’

For the Maya, she is the goddess of growth, as well as the conductor of disease
Popol Vuh tells that two siblings were transformed into the sun and the other the moon
Maybe she is patroness of Venus, connected to the jaguar god of the underworld
Or, maybe it is sibling rivalry that punctuates our skies

That lunar being is not only white, but it can appear to us as golden rivers of black and blue
Some nights it disappears behind the blanket of the universe, guarding its shyness
Performing magic behind a cloud on a breathless night confident you’ll discover its indiscretion
When the thirteenth moon rises, and the sky is illuminated sapphire its powers will grant your wish

Lycanthropy takes place nights of the Lunar Effect and many lock their doors and windows
This Transylvania Hypothesis is based on no scientific reason but the belief in deviant behavior
Nights of this wicked moon remain in light levels throughout our world
Lunatic is Luna and can be found in the writings of Babylon

This celestial object has been our literary master to extend our words further
To set the setting, to explain our infinite strangeness, to design our fate destined under black skies
It’s a puzzle, that beaming sphere in the sky man has attempted for millennia to understand
To demand why it shines down upon us in mockery while the remainder of the sky has fallen to darkness