❦❁❦
A Note on the 100th Poem
Written on 5/5/25, but unplanned
I didn’t intend to write one hundred poems. There was no grand design, countdown, or finish line. I simply followed the call to write—one piece at a time. Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, the number gathered, and shaped itself into a quiet milestone.
This collection doesn’t close out of bitterness or exhaustion—it closes because the arc has curved inward. It has folded itself into something complete. Not perfect. But whole.
Thank you for walking with me this far. I leave these words for you now—to carry, question, keep, or to forget. Whatever you choose, I hope something here stays within you.
I won’t be publishing any new works for now. The next pieces will belong to the book.
Let love be the last good thing.
—Marni
100th:
Poem 100: The Offering
0505.2025
❀༺༻❀
Don’t laugh—
I see love in every pair of eyes,
even the hardest punk hides
a soft smile behind the bruise.
The rain hasn’t stopped for three days.
Where it ends and my tears begin, I don’t know.
And still—
I smile for strangers.
I smile for the silence.
Let us all smile at one another,
even as our hearts break like fruit.
Let us offer our hands,
not in triumph,
but in good faith and fellowship—
because it is right.
Because it is good.
Because mercy is a melody,
and love may be the last good thing.
I do not want to give myself to apathy.
I want to take the light in my skin,
the sun from my mouth,
the moon from my eyes,
the stars caught in my hair—
and hold them out like lanterns
so others might see what I see,
feel what I feel.
If I could re-root the weary,
guide back the ones
who trusted the wrong gods—
I would.
But alas,
I am a dying breed—
a dryad in a city of fire,
a fairy in a falling forest.
I am one of the last
who still remembers
my mother
and father.
Did we not wake aching today?
Did we not wake alone?
Then take what I have.
My hand.
My smile.
My time.
My body.
Let me help balance what you cannot.
I ask for nothing
but to be made whole
through the love
I try to give.
✾❁✾
m.c.f.
Not A Problem
The Ruined
0505.2025
They took your love and hammered it to glass,
then made you dance upon the shards.
They bent your truth until it sang their name—
a crooked bell rung only to cast blame.
They wore your mercy like a stolen veil,
then burned the thread and blamed your hands.
They drank the wine you bled from fruit
and called it poison when their lips turned red.
But don’t feed crows that peck the roots of you.
Let silence be the choir of your rise.
Those blind to self will mirror you with smoke—
but you are carved from older, wiser fire.
You were not made to bridle storms with faith.
Unclench.
Let go the reins.
Trust your instincts and your craft.
Drink the sun in tinctures laced with gold.
Swallow the moon through the doors of your eyes.
Let stars dissolve like ash upon your tongue,
and float through sky as if it were a tear
you stitched with dusk and dawn
and breathing alone.
Walk—
not straight, but true.
Walk—
along the braided edge,
where light and shadow learn to hold their hands.
And flee the ones who see your fall as fate—
they wear no wings,
for they had clipped them young.
m.c.f.
Glass and Gold
The Reversal
0505.2025
(for Yivannia, in a season of bluebells)
Of all the bluebells,
you were the rose—
late-blooming, miniature,
and eternally eternal.
The bluebells rang out and were gone,
too shallow to drink
where I had sunk.
But you:
rooted.
Listening.
Bright as a sun
kept secret in the earth.
Let the world turn on,
watching with its blind eye—
let it breathe heavy with opinion,
never knowing
we reversed the rotation.
Let it churn,
let it spin its shiny wheel.
We stepped off.
Let everything be what it craves to be—
the loud, the endless, the cruel.
But we?
We moved the stars in silence.
We learned how to build a chapel
from ruin.
Even our kindness was brutalized,
left trembling,
and still
we cupped the ones we loved
in ruined hands—
as if they were birds
and we the last branches.
Now dawn unrolls
like a ribbon tied high in the sky—
and the ark of it is inevitable.
So:
Let us laugh.
Let us lean into gossip.
Let us sip,
let us flirt,
let us wear the faces they gave us
like masks made of glass.
Let them bring offerings:
flowers,
chocolate,
the slick syllables of praise.
Let them pry and press
as if our thighs
were vaults of gold—
but we,
we hold the key.
We know.
And it will always be
no.
And should you stagger,
and should you question
the worth of your breath
I will take your hand—
not gently,
but rightly—
and steer you from the fire
that asks you to kneel.
You are not meant for less.
You were born for the throne.
m.c.f.
For Me/For Anyone/For Women
To Whom It Concerns
0504.2025
I was once pitch black, back then,
but one day my blindness
crawled from its tar,
emerging the color of dusk that’s
caught in cracked glass —
To my amazement and awe,
The wound in my heart turned from
red, to this violet bleeding into gold,—
a glow that doesn’t seek to be understood, but how I wished it could have been witnessed.
oh, sweet girl — there is weather in you yet:
a wind that bends trees or tears roofs off,
and it only depends upon
How formidable the enemy is,
or how loyal someone dares to be with you.
oh broken soul, smelling like cedar, old books, and jasmine just before bloom—
you move like someone who’s held a newborn—
and carries your ruined past in the same arms —
(How do I make a home for both?
But I do.)
You’re the sound of a typewriter at 2 a.m.,
a Bach cello suite echoing through a nearly empty room,
the crack of a spine opening a long-lost journal entry.
Your sensuality doesn’t ask for permission —
it just exists, like rain on warm skin.
You are not flirtation. You are invitation—
and only courage, with its love
would know what to do with that.
You are tired though, not hollow.
You’ve made love to death more than once —
And still remembered to water the flowers
and love others.
You are not here to be palatable.
You are not here to be easy.
You are here to break old patterns and raise ghosts —
You are here to build altars out of art
that outlive everyone who doubted your worth.
You are not hers.
You are not his.
You are your own.
And you are not done yet.
m.c.f.
[system override: desire.exe]
L8X-DV8
1104.2009
She’s wires and circuits,
and pleasure-mode strings—
An 8+ positive sex-bot
that sings.
She boots for command,
with no moral delay—
Just type the request,
and she renders the play.
Made to tease,
Built to please,
CTRL+ALT+DEVIATE,
Sliding smooth on auto-ease.
She’s tubes and wires
with a stiletto click,
Her hips write code
that’ll make you sick.
Magnetic-synthetic,
cybernetic sex-noob,
Stiletto allegretto,
neon-lit test tube—
Plug in the port,
then watch her compute you.
She scans your face
for consented delight,
Then locks you down
in her feedback bite.
Red-light circuits,
hips that commit,
AI heat
with a strap-on kit.
She don’t drink,
but she’ll make you drown—
In script loops written
from the waistline down.
So boot up the cam,
let the voltage glow—
She’s here to RAM,
and code-stroke libido.
She logs your pulse,
your sounds, your shame,
Then stores your moan
under legacy name.
Ease into her
with a grip-fit set,
Chrome so tight—
it’s your best sin yet.
m.c.f.
Distant Clouds
Same Sky
0503.2025
(For a day like this)
The sky doesn’t lie—
has nothing to gain
from motivation—
it breathes what we cannot say.
Clouded here,
clouded there,
the light might be
withholding its final word.
And somewhere,
he might be looking up,
wondering why it feels
heavier than it should.
And somewhere,
I am too.
Two cities.
Two silences.
One sky,
waiting to clear
or bust wide open
its tears.
— m.c.f.
Emily
Emily Fucking Dickinson
(An Ode To Emily)
0502.2025
⊰⊹✿♡✿⊹⊱
(This is Emily Fucking Dickinson, time-traveling into my cortex on a Tuesday, eyeliner smudged, with zero fucks left to ration.)
She wore white—
for the purity of feels,
because language’s blood
is vivid on clean linen.
She closed her door
to temper her silence
into the sharpest blade,
before it bleeds the eyes
and ruptures the soul.
They called her mad.
She said it was
thinking—
“LOUD.”
She folded verses
Turned them into
charges of dynamite,
tucked them away
between some worn buttons
and the rolling thunder.
The men withheld her—
turned her to a whisper.
But she was a riot
yelling in slant rhyme,
and she owned everyone.
Nature was her side peace.
God—her pen pal.
Death wooed, but
She made him wait
at the garden gate —
then she reshaped
the cosmos.
They thought her lonely.
She was just
undisturbed.
Call her a ghost—
but do it right:
“Emily Fucking Dickinson.”
The bitch who stitched bees
into her vowels
and wrote eternity
on the back of an envelope.
m.c.f.
Vamps
Autumn Mouth
(For Heather)
0501.2025
(for the night we danced ourselves dizzy Lizzie)
Do you remember the autumn night
our ghosts spun in breathless circles—
not earthbound,
but blooming?
You were Mina-bound,
skin like ivory silk,
a flower pressed
between the breath
of one century and the next.
Translucent. Laughing.
Your mouth full of red wine
and death.
You tipped back your throat
like an offering,
and the moon pulled us
into a ballroom of frost
and forgetting.
We danced
because we already died.
We died
because we already danced.
White,
and lost in the beauty
of winter’s death—
that slow elegy
we knew was coming
to turn the petals into bone.
Oh,
sweet vampire—
we were twice bitten.
We were willing.
And we never wanted
to come back the same.
m.c.f.
Sorry
Silence Be
0501.2025
Take my silence as a gift.
Let its span bring your life lividity.
Let my prescience be enough—
the epistles of my dumb heart,
written in the ache and dust
of its lessons,
holy to your life.
Because for now, my one life—
its courage has become
a little white bird—
bone-light, wing-worn—
and she is being eaten mid-flight
by a darkness falling too fast
for anything, even dying,
to escape it.
O, the night and I know how this ends.
The dark is not always a blanket, but a hunter.
Its arrow does not miss.
Its kiss will last all eternity.
The ending does not ask.
It arrives.
Pierces.
Refuses to apologize.
And through its silence—and still—
through the quickening
of my dwindling constitution,
I soar,
one breaststroke at a time,
through a sky
that has already laid claim to me.
And this is how it ends:
with a kind of kiss—
where I invite the groom of ruin
to press his mouth to mine
and close the chapter,
lowering my body into the ground
like a reward for enduring,
a breath held too long.
I’m glad.
Relieved.
Let the conclusion quiet
what I once dared to sing.
I remember when I was
loud and bright and burning—
when I sang like a dove
mourning her own broken face in the sky,
like I believed I could call the dead
back into their skins.
And maybe I did.
Who can say?
But now—
The silence is a morgue’s sheet,
soaked in its desire for my body.
The longing is so perverse
it has gone mute.
Even the stars have turned their faces.
And I am tired
of meaning things.
So end me.
Or change the sky.
But do not ask me
to sing again
without something holy
in my throat.
m.c.f.
Passing
love & time
0430.2025
I. Burial
How does one bury a heart
and still love?
Maybe not out of grace—
but habit.
Maybe not out of hope—
but because even the dying
still feed the flame until its eaten,
But I can’t.
I want to quiet it now.
The voice,
the longing,
the instinct to reach—
I want it still.
Not healed.
I want nothing.
Let the fire go cold.
Let the sky press its weight.
Let it crack - let it break.
I’ve carried enough.
I spoke plainly and no one stayed.
I offered truth and was called a threat.
I loved like a lantern
and burned the loves
who preferred dark rooms.
In the end they ate me,
leaving ideologies meaningless—
let me leave my hope in
the things I make.
Let my heart be unearthed by those
who walk through the world
with enough love for us all —
don’t let my life and its work
be for nothing.
O! Distant moon and stars!!
Breeze that was so soothing —
once the jasmin scent upon your wings
filled my head-
how come you don’t kiss me!?
Wind with your sad moan,
I felt less alone and softened
by the gentle songs of birds
that flew from your mouth -
why don’t you carry your words
home to me any longer!?
Why do you reveal yourselves to me,
Then forsake this life who sees you?
There is no victory in this.
No clarity.
No transcendence.
It simply is:
that I have nothing left to give,
and no hands left to hold.
I loved.
II. Cessation
I don’t want to care, but do
To this degree—
it’s a whisper from a voice
that won’t die.
Even now,
with my hands emptied of meaning,
I still ache for someone to take what’s left.
But they never did.
Not the mother.
Not the father.
Not the ones who said love
but meant obedience.
Not the one I waited for
while breaking into smaller pieces
just to be easier to hold.
I am not rising.
I am not enduring.
I am just—
stopping.
And that, too, is a kind of prayer.
Let them forget me.
Let the petals fall on nothing.
They don’t beg—
they quietly sigh one last time,
then die into their unraveling.
Let the art be unseen,
Let the love be unread,
nobody ever heard me.
Let the fire end without metaphor.
I loved.
III. The Leaving
Sometimes I have died.
Not just once—
but in ways that leave no wound,
the proof of life’s absence
was my surviving
just to try and fix what
was born beautiful inside me,
to be colder,
harder,
less feeling.
I once touched the stars,
believing they were mine to hold.
I reached so far into the light
I forgot my hands were burning.
But even that was better than
the cold of being untouched,
even it was better than having hands
that bloomed into worthlessness.
There is no fear left
for what meets my life now.
The ache has made a home in me,
and I have stopped evicting it.
So I shut my door closed—
gently, without ceremony—
for this stint,
for this lifetime,
for however long the silence requires.
Maybe I cannot settle myself here.
Maybe I was not made
for the soil and the circle,
for the open-mouthed hunger
of a world that bites what bleeds.
Maybe gravity always felt foreign.
The earth has never held me right.
And walking it now—
feels unwelcome,
I am a trespasser in a dream
where I was never invited to wake.
I loved.
m.c.f.
My Cathedral
Stardust
0426.2025
I couldn’t bind my heart to the words of books
that were written by hands afraid of the dark.
Kneeling before the ghosts of men—then trembling—seemed cowardly, a lie.
I have read the verses and heard their promises,
counted the cracks, and felt the fissure in my heart swell beneath their lies—
I wandered the ruins of their gardens and couldn’t sow roots.
It seems civilizations weathered the destruction of their tales,
and some of their children found not a single seed where truth could grow—
I couldn’t.
When I was a child,
I searched the night skies for answers—
fell into its maw and became a seeker.
Not a throne, not a punishment,
not a heavenly reward was sought for—
but a voice made of river, ocean, starlight, and stone—
the proof that everything, and I, are not alone—
arrived on the world’s wind and had my ear.
So I fasted with the hunger of saints,
wanted to touch upon their wisdom,
and found holiness is not a cage,
but a current running through
the veins of the Earth itself.
The stars and I—made of the same ash.
The animals and I—carved from the same clay that breathes.
The oceans, the dirt, the salt on my skin—
these are the scriptures I listen to.
There is this that I know of,
and it is the pulse inside all living things—
the cry of connection,
the ache of belonging—
the wild song of broken planets becoming whole.
It is the womb of the universe
that birthed us into being.
I do not need a page to prove it.
The Earth is my book.
m.c.f.
Restless Architects
My Hands
1110.2009
What are these ten-limbed animations,
of air and considerations?
They have become obsessed
with building bridges,
and dying languages.
They are the ten artists —
of song and story,
sweeping lines of lament and joy,
when bursting in their dawn.
They only want to know.
They only want to sing.
They are the stubborn geniuses
of my arms and shoulders —
brilliant in restless motion,
mindless in absent thought.
Their minds are nothing,
mere leaves of skin and bone
knotted at the joints,
aching in their purpose —
it’s a means to an end
for them to remain
so blindly tethered.
O slender branches of my bough,
O harvesters of my garden—
my hands, my hands,
O my maddening hands—!
forever restless,
forever mine.
m.c.f.
Explaining One’s Heart
The Reason I Love You
1012.2024
You ask me why—
as if love requires proof,
as if a bird must explain
why it moves from blossom to blossom,
trembling in the hush
between fragrance and flight.
Still—
I will try.
I love you
because when I sit alone in the dark,
I notice a small bird
fluttering from bud to bud—
drawn not by beauty alone,
but by its ache of belonging.
I watch it settle—
soft, deliberate—
and think
how it must love
the way the blossom opens
without promise,
and how it must thank the sky
for the weightless hush
and star-silver quiet
that kisses its wings
mid-song.
That is how my love lives—
not spoken,
but breathed:
in stillness,
in return,
in the long flight
between your eyes.
And yet,
because the heart wars for what it loves,
I never know
if that’s enough—
if my reasons will quiet
the child in you
who still asks.
So as the sun rises,
and I end this poem,
I sigh—
knowing you will read it,
and still not understand.
And I will love you
just the same.
— m.c.f.
Romantic Haikus
Love Haiku
Inamorata—
He stalks the sweet scent of me,
Wanting without end.
✥
Dread Haiku
I fear his cold hand
Holds the glass heart meant for me—
Small pieces falling.
✥
Obsession Haiku
Morning brings it back,
What night tried to bury deep—
The echo of want.
✥
Longing Haiku I
Time’s sea stretches wide,
Wider than the day is long—
My want walks slowly.
✥
Longing Haiku II
The tide does not move,
Seconds fold into themselves—
My breath waits for yours.
✥
Longing Haiku III
I count every hour,
But none of them carry you—
Only your absence.
Natural Haikus
Conversation Haiku
Our two tongues speaking,
woven voices intertwine—
a shared rhapsody.
✥
Winter Haiku
A tree’s slow undress,
wearing diamond fetters—
light bound to branches.
✥
Jon Haiku
Alabaster form
in empyrean expanse—
white dove’s playground.
✥
Tristitia Abyssus
Do Not Fall Into Love
08.13.2012
Do not fall into love,
because your eyes are wide closed
and hope—an unbroken flower—
splits amid the savage night.
Do not fall into love
as things escape you, one by one,
and fall into silence,
little by little,
until nothing remains but your heart,
pleading release from its rose jail.
Because the sky that once swam with birds
joins nothing to its sunless arch.
And the fruit that dressed trees in March
meets death early—
its beginning flung into wind,
spat upon the dirt’s winter tomb.
Then twilight removes the stars from its face,
and night drops upon the world with rage,
striking its fist against the spine of your desire—
and nothing stays
but a ghost
and a craving.
Because now, my feet carry a corpse across wastelands—
wherever I’m lost,
passing from day to day without rest.
And wherever my love
tries flying with one broken wing,
it trips instead—
a lame and littered bird,
caught in its own wanting.
As if the whisper of your name
parts from my mouth
and cries back to me—
as if the hope I lost
when my love was an emerald
vanishes in the spume
and buries itself
in the breasts of the sea.
No—
do not fall into love,
eyes of my eyes.
Because steadily now,
I undress myself.
My blouse—
the one that begged for your hands to remove her—
lies crumpled,
lonely,
on the floor.
m.c.f.
A Funeral Garden
The Children of Sedlec Ossuary
01.01.2009
Soon, the black and green tide—
lilacs laid across white marble,
the last breath’s bloom,
and the last sigh’s fading hues.
Soon, the tired and naked copses—
children of November asleep
in wood-lined cradles,
beneath plaques inscribed
with celebration’s cold grammar.
Their skin sings into dust.
Once mated to linen,
once the beloved
on a morgue’s generous table,
now only the echo—
like a bell’s final toll at dusk.
This is the promise:
hesitant,
half-whispered,
never rescinded.
m.c.f.