I found you

lone brick, of a million, one part of a mortared whole

your brothers now buried by time, without benediction  

progeny of clay, shale, you were born in a kiln as hot as all creation

dragged to this plain by spoked wheel and mule--sweat of the honest illiterate

long before the dusters blew the crops to hell, and Tom Joad's kin to the promised land

the mason who laid you in a proud straight row is now in the ground too

not a mile from you, where the county put him the hot Friday a man set foot on the moon

the bricklayer’s days with the trowel long past, his memories of you, your place in all weathers interred with him  

I found you , and you are the man’s legacy, he yours

Once I was young and strong,
Consumed with compelling
desires of Horizon Lust,
traveling forth wide and far.

Time and age has intervened,
now I stand alone and wait
high above on the city gate,
Silent sentry to all of those young
lives that venture forth to explore
horizons of their own, and those
weather beat ones like me
returning to rest and remain.

Accepting as I must, that I shall
never again roam too far afield  
from my place upon the gate,
Content with a life well lived,
to languish now upon this place.

Horizon Lust is for the young.

I saw a dance today
That whirled and jumped and laughed on its feet.
An old folk dance
Kalidescopic roiling upon a cool breath
Of autumn’s excitement of being alive
A dance observed by a reflective summer
Gamboling leaves of red, orange, ambers and browns
Phrenetic leaping twirling jumping flipping
And landing with glee

I saw a dance today
Whose steely precision punctured the earth
An operatic ending
Piling blue-ice masses on frost annealed soil
Of winter’s excitement on being, of existence
Impervious to life, alive with death
Hard percusive articulation, blunt statement
Tap, tap, beat and pound
Thud and thrum with efficient punctuated finesse

I did a dance today
Tears and sorrow and sonorous wings flailing
Old and intimate
Terminus found rhythm stand still, now done
Of winter no more, and blindness onset, for the morrow
Moves stopped but not so its ripples
Wave celerity, an expanding profound smile
Leg, arm and head pause
While all effects and causes silently, strongly take wing
Take wing
A cacaophonic stirring, but quiet and motionless and brimming with void
Except in spirt where muscle and wings and winds alight anew.
I did a final dance today, spirit born and coda bent.

The words in the melody
  the words on the page

Related but different
  the Minstrel and Sage

The music recaptures
  what ink only starts

As harmony sings
  from an angelic heart

A phrase and a lyric
  as cousins relate

Too distant for brothers
  too close in their fate

One soul with two masters
  each fighting to gain

Your soul ever after
—your spirit to claim

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2018)

I

Possesion/extension
Nightly woman instinct,
lend your guiding scent
to fierce winds/
combining
into poison,
deliver down
my mercy to the great shining

(seduction poetics,
unrestrained and visible like a crown
of death hanging proud
by my bedside, eager
to martyr oneself for fertility)

Cosmogonic dawn/blinking fire-wheels,
shallow, holy waters
receding as silken tides, awoke from idleness

Discarded silver haloes, thrown into the hallowed dirt to drench in mortal youth

Monarch eyes/careful
heart, sealed/felt lucidly
worried/cavernous and hidden/wild kingdom dancer

A proclaimed Fool.
Imitator, mutilator
clay creator/for pathless ambition
I sink further in sand
which lacks definition, it is careless
like myself

(take a trip to Angel river, where one longs to be freed from skeleton grins
& pagan bathtubs, pollinating one
with wivesblood)

II

Out of the fog to a
marriagebed & lambs head
mounted, awkwardly
backdropped to an altar of Furze &
disorientation-theatres draped in Neon
& excess
(where even the walls are unaware of their own Earthly position)

If I am the stone,
you are the water, carving
me closer to your desired
shape

to become an Outer, a cloud-catcher, liplurker, destined to Saturn worship

III

My zeal is an impatient grave & you assume the feral mother
whose flashflood voice draws me to rest

..Yet, I am willing. Carry my body
to your domain, feast kindly, until
paradise is all that remains of us both