A Cardiac Episode

There is a hollow carved in me,
an area created by hepatic knurling.
A space which serves as a hospice
for my Care, and Hope.
A place where these two
are given warm towels
light but tasty food, and
236 channels of cable TV
for entertainment while they
wait and bleed. I can
hear the rasp of their
labored breath; the choking
hemoptysis; the lesion wails
they cry into their pillows when
they believe no one else is
around. My heart is
heavy from the ichnite
filling the spaces
they have fallen from;
I drift in hemal circles.


-- from Sleeping with Nefarious Intent

Lunacy

from Sleeping with Nefarious Intent

With the eddy motion
of autumnal fog -- hushed
as last breath around
the shanks of men -- the
Moon strolls to her apex;
planets are  her path stones.
Her lunette breasts sheathed
in the fabric of lithium clouds,
keened sheer by the West wind,
distract even far flown storm.
Her youth is vibrant;
Kev blue eyes, promethium
skin. Her passage silent;
latria songs marquertied in the
mercerized gown across her thighs.
The radiant goddess of the manes,
and mercurial denizens; who shift
through islands of amber light
and shadows bloated with night;
the hiemal ecosystem of the
streets below.
Those whose lives are ruled by tides,
respect her budding aspect, aware
that these maturing eyes remember
the snarled hours of her crone,
and the ensanguine gown
sometimes worn on nights she
is in bloom; hungry.

Even in her darkest age -- her petals flint,
her brilliance burned -- she entices
latent swells to rise and churn.
Men and women of the tides and sea
have heard the whales sing to
her noir-waters above, twining
the celestial to earth with
bind-song harmonies of worship
and love.
Those of lupine nature are more repine,
knowing all of her aspects are heady and
sublime. The call and howl from deep
wood and vale, for the West wind to
bring her full cloak and hood, to cover
her lunar light and its silver urn, before
the world is warped by the
effusion vapors of quicksilver burn.

Walking through Logan

Here I move among the happenings,

breathing the miasmas of needing,

hearing the the wrenching seizures of solitude

and foot fall through the shallows

of winter's waters

horded in pot-holes.

In the dark looks, under the heavy brows

of the shadows limping past, needing,

I see their eyes are no longer

lucid devices.

Headlights and Broadways

by static amber light and

speeding white-blue

a boy picks from the gutter

not a toy,

or a ball,

not a coin,

but the death of a squirrel

holding it high

bushy brush tail wire

between thumb and forefinger

Joy

alarms from his lips

but there is too much alarm

on these streets

for others to notice.

The Furies and Lucidity

You hear a hundred darker lines

each turn of the sunlight

mine are only troubling

in an articulate way

The voice of the calling

from outside the amber light

inside the edge of shadows

is easy to ignore

He is mad you say

His is intoxicated and estranged

He is not me you say

You walk on untouched

My words are ruthless lucidity

Dark, yes, Shadow, yes... clear

not coal for wrath

but edged for bloodletting

Within the melee and uproar

of the towering full moon

may my words taint

the madness calling

and open to you,

the woes and the furies in his drunken heart

The Morrigan

From Ghost Pictures

She is the vibration,

the note, the chord

of night's abject abysses

which sundered my eye's light

From full lips

dropped with

red wine dew;

Moonlight silver

on her wetting tongue... perish

Between stones and surrenders

under descending onyx autumn

on brittle leaves and moss rock

Winter's waters draw from breath

a cannonade of thirst.

Crow and wolf

and cat's eyes

will open before

the pith of the sun

hurling the rage of day

like snow across the dead

The Time that held her Still

The musk of rotting walls

laced with web and dust

and ivy's fresh green

wet dark by fog

A blue dress,

the hem a scythe-whisper

across grass and weed.

Alabaster fingers

bruised by brick.

Fear runs, tracking blood

in its wake and wash

of flowers, closed, but

waiting.

Hands, white, gripping stone,

pulling,

wanting.

Sunlight, pulled under the mist water

drowning...

Time

white and bruised as the fingers which

claw the walls, crumbling

slips its hands between her breasts

to hold

her heart still.

Mom not the mother of the child in her womb - Chimerism

Off the Wikipedia page for Lydia Fairchild. 

Lydia Fairchild was pregnant with her third child, when she and the father of her children, Jamie Townsend, separated. When Fairchild applied for welfare support in 2002, she was requested to provide DNA evidence that Townsend was the father of her children. While the results showed Townsend was certainly the father of the children, the DNA tests indicated that she was not their mother.

This resulted in Fairchild being taken to court for fraud for claiming benefit for other people's children or taking part in a surrogacy scam. Hospital records of her prior births were disregarded. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken into care. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered a witness be present at the birth. This witness was to ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild. Two weeks later, DNA tests indicated that she was not the mother of that child either.

A breakthrough came when a lawyer for the prosecution found an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about a similar case that had happened in Boston, and realised that Fairchild's case might also be caused by chimerism. In 1998, 52-year old Boston teacher Karen Keegan was in need of a kidney transplant. When her three adult sons were tested for suitability as donors, it was discovered that two of them did not match her DNA to the extent that her biological children should. Later testing showed that Keegan was a chimera, a combination of two separate sets of cell lines with two separate sets of chromosomes, when a second set of DNA was found in other tissues. This DNA presumably came from a different embryo from the one that gave rise to the rest of her tissues.

Fairchild's prosecutors suggested this possibility to her lawyers, who arranged further testing. As in Keegan's case, DNA samples were taken from members of the extended family. The DNA for Fairchild's children matched that of her mother to the extent expected of a grandmother. They also found that while the DNA in Fairchild's skin and hair did not match her children; the DNA from a cervical smear test was different and did match. Fairchild was carrying two different sets of DNA, the defining characteristic of a chimera.