Remember who you are.
Remember where you came from.
Remember what you’ve done.
Drawing breathes and stitching yarns
And have only but begun.

You are Chicago royalty.
You were born from black and blue.
You’ve got Maxwell’s equations,
Maier’s eye and Leaf’s Coney Island hue
and you owe no one explanations.

Know what you want from life.
Know that you can take it all in stride,
Know that you have Sandburg’s shoulders
Rising like a skyline, dividing like river
and winding like the city.

Lady Libertine, I beseech thee.
Transform me with your kiss.
Infuse my tongue with drunken song
And curl my hands to fists.

Slake my thirst with your cyclix
And feast on my ruined bones
I have nothing left and offer it all,
No family,
No country,
No home.

I am the orphan in need of suckling -
the drunkard needing weaned.
Clutch me to your cold breast
and swaddle me in sage.

I slit my wrists and bear my chest.
I beg you strike me down
Give me one more drip of inspiration,
One last rite upon my crown.

Let me die with you on my lips
and bleed my heart onto the ground.
Lady Libertine, I beseech thee
end me with your kiss.

Love sucks like every inaccurate description of a black hole
Where the designer got physics wrong and the dimensions droll
Our singular minds cannot understand the mathematics required
To calculate the blow out of our heart well’s desire.

What dilations of space and time can explain your gravity
As you bend the light toward my eyes and concave a cavity
Shaping uncertain principles and impossible probabilites
Outrunning you breaks constant Justlaws amd my capabilities

Reduce me to a singularity’s point
When ego means nothing and the self is disjoint
Stretch my being until the fibers untwine
And give me a parsec’s unit of time

For a looping eternity would not be enough

Two black flowers reach
over graves of parted past
to touch leaf and stem

Their roots feed on buried bones
So their buds can bloom anew

I embraced Mother Earth.
I can still smell her on my skin.
I can still feel the strength of her bones,
beneath my hands that raked her soil.
Cast in the iron pumping through her like lava
flowing from her molten core.

I danced through her sands
and scaled every mountain peak
and followed the lead of her gentle curves.
The feminine form of the Pacha Mama,
The Gaia, the Demeter, that sacred body.
That well-spring of life,
The true feminine form
That is stronger than I,
welcoming me down
until I am buried.