When I roll my tongue--
Cellar door,
Cellar door,
Cellar door.

The lime,
Shored up, spine cracked
And open paged
Is ridden with vine,
Life
Rife with tree and green
A hidden lung
To which you inspired,
This rich tapestry of coral
From old looms of woven Word.

As time washes them to the sea
And their beached bones populate the beaches
I rest my feet on the shores of shores
The neap of these spires
The catch of your breath

And am left without any.

One of the minnows
Cast in the light
As blades of chaff in a summer plain
Flares, as a star in the dappled light
To become the murk of dancing sea.


As babel casts distance between our words
Flowers and plants we drink and burn
Our church is upon the water,
Where God writes his testament in the rock
And shows us Our image
Reflected on the sea

Where I come to understand
Command
The path of all beneath
The current made
With every stroke
Guided and goaded
With rice and stick
With love and fear
I knew Him in me.

The deep holds Your waning disk
Twilight dyes the waters
I saw the wonder placed in us
Traced upon the fleeing skies

I have no words for your kindness
I found etched between the ancient grains
Only that I wish I could see them better
Written for more familiar shores.

As darkness blots the sky with ink
And the ocean fades into crashing waves
I am left with but the faintest warmth of day
Whispered 'long the breeze.

For a moment,
All I could see was the water--
At night, the lights embedded along the surface--
Shining as jewels.

The air is cold, the kind that kisses the breath of covered mouths
And gifts my own with truly visible spirit of hot air, rising into an empty night.

She's with me here--the most beautiful moment in the world cannot exist without it.

That feeling of love, warms every streetlight along the Arno
Every whistle along the Danube
They all sing, shine, in dance for you.

The years that built those piazza,
The generations who smiled upon the cathedrals
The God who lived and died
To bring us right here,
Toe to toe,
Cheek to cheek,
Lip to lip

Two souls, tangled in the vines
And drunk of its fruits

May we find love in these streets,
On these banks
Rich with the feelings
Of all those who set their feet
To the tune of these sweet winter nights.

Can you lament the loss
Of art
With me?
That all this--
Every part,
Has to be
Broken
Deconstructed
Probed
For its ichorus juice

And mixed up into a poultice
Of parlor trick
mirrored upon our asphalt
As oil slick

Lament this loss of art
When the meter ***** off
To the picture of rhyme
And the Earth is a ball
Floating backwards in time
As brute animals stare
in constellation
At a star-sketched sky.

It was enough for artists to have to constrain
Themselves to knowledge of the natural grain
Of syntax and measure
In which we design
Our lives,
And passed ourselves on
To the grief of our daughters

With such failure of art
Even they would not bother.

No hope for this,
This is but the status
of dead poets

And yet we do not weep.

No need, we are inspired by the sickly
The eminent decay
She is the muse of our words
The sadist of all our play

Just as when our fathers sought to rebuild their dreams,
Our kin are excited, delighted by obscene
Obscurity,
and isolation of the penitent mind,
To commit societal acts
Of the dastardly kind

I am but a Reed, a float on the stream
I am but delicate-phrased
Scaffolding - -

And even me,
With all my tender lonely
Body,
Cannot in good conscience save
Anybody.



Our world of dreams is but a bunch of rows,
With even the picket posts
Torn from their ancient holes--

This is the fate of the ants of the earth
The dust of the stuff,
The fit of this pit,

Those that have no hope for the metere
Above
The senseless rhyme
Of the lost divine

Limitless space,
The eminent decay,
Atomic malfeasance
And interaction, risqué

Even couplets are ******* in this
Autonomous age,
Even the coming together
Of words on a page

In anything more than subjective display,
This word seeks not to know
Of this limitless race

To the end of it all,
To the flip of the page,
To the top of the spire,
And away from the mire

Enough!.
Too caught
in the wrong fuHawking
Black hole.

Poor man, in recognizing his own wretchedness sole
Upon the Plains of Tunis, and the pillars of smoke

His enemy obliterated from the earth
But their soul,
Not so.

Rome, his daughter, to one day be given to the field
To be cast as coin and
As a slave, sold

The gift of Scipio's victory
Fades unknown
as the iron fence on the gates
Pounded by salted airs
And lost to bitter seas

Or the broken spines of buildings drenched in sanguine pleas
Of the demolished, pitiful
Defenders of brooding earth.

But do not despair young Scipio!
Your tears need not plant themselves upon these sands
And sow these seeds of eventuality

Rise your Saber and shield, order the command
For the sake of love and power,
For the glory of your state

Be proud, you great Achilles, ye servant soldier clean,
Wash the blood beneath you, and give to them their deeds

These men who dared defy you, your presidential will,
The men who walked beside you, who suffered every ill

To them you make this pact, to them your will enact--

To them your curse betrays you, to kin and king exact.

I want to wear a Persian shirt,
Run through meadows in a Celtic skirt--

I want to Don a Russian hat,
And plant my *** on the throne of Rome.

I want to bomb my words upon
London, Lisbon; Taipei, Taiwan

I would diffuse my fissile mind
And launch theoretical material like guided missiles

Give me this world of sand as a ball,
And children on the playground to toss against the wall--

It is a gift of thought to view the bulb
Of this time as a light in the firehouse
That ultimately dies
Only to be remembered by Liver's More.

Rumi was a great man,

But as the fire that burns in but one hearth,

The Gala Hall remains damp and cold.