Every day.
The everyday.
You see it every day.
The twitch and reel and marble movement
As turgid blood surfaces to face,
Flows to operate stiff shoulders.
Backs hunch as soon as they're alone.
And they are alone.
Surrounded by lovers that
Love in word only.
They chew their nails and cross their ankles.
Uncross.
And look around.

Spring. Could you imagine?
Gear, wire. Did he say?
Bolt, frame. Isn't he?
Ratchet. And then what did he say?
Screws.
Rotor.
A bunch of ****.
Oil.
Oil.
Oil. Oil. Oil.
Plug in.
Silence.
It moves.

We move a head in times of
Strain. To signify
Exact measures.
Twist on axis
With perfect posture.
Unnoticed frameworks bar our days.
We are brass.
The more crass are silver, gold.
And the days are polish. Or maybe sand.
Soon there are no mistakes.
The veneer cakes without flaw.
We do not acknowledge.
We are not caught.

For little hours though, there are kinks.
Pauses.
Errors.
Open the clockwork face.
What is stuck?
A look around.
The gears that grind us to cognition
Are jammed by a fly-body
Of soul.
Soon, soon, sooner than ever
It will be crushed.
So gears might continue,
Might make room for the everyday.

As I stand in the field, it occurs
To me, like a mosquito bedding down
in an ear, how light I am this
life. How shallow do I feel
To have trekked in loosest soil, over
Land and across years yet
have so little fiber clinging in my
soles for proof. I may as
Well have been but a step in
Sand at a tide that gasps
its opens shut at night.

On evenings such as this, I wish I had
that inborn ache to cling to pen and page
and spread that sweet salve, ink, upon my thoughts.
But lost am I in spite of hindsight. Made
to gloss the details and emotions here
in voices strange from what I know or trust.
As such my words are handicapped to show
the brute ephemera I need my readers
locked away from my intent to know.
[Please note the rhyming there was not foreseen,
If anything the rhyme detracts the sheen.]
But still the message has to be declaimed:
     For no man taking pen and ink to page,
     was e'er a one a Shakespeare to his age.

(And mark you now the setting here does change)
O greater souls than I, I do beseech,
For here in cold packed earth are mortals bound.
Through mist and age the stones about ye crack
With Death triumphant making quiet rounds
About the silent earth, I plead to you
Good fellows, lasses tell me why you've died
What sins, what straws as would have broke a camel's back!

And from the ground a sound is faintly heard
By mine own ears as would a stomach turn
In any man that Fears his loving god.
The silence of the grave is cast with cries
Of silent sinners toiling in a Hell
Contained in plagued mourners' hearts.
They wrack
And reel in illusory pain constructed
By a mother, sister, husband, son
Who could not deal with earthly loss and so
Must feel sub-earthen torture nice-named
"Living After Death."
     And all God's children die in strife:
     A soul enslaved to an afterlife.

(Again be quick for here it doth conclude)
But let me not be chained with empty graves
Whose absence from this world is justified
By gentlemen in god's most high esteem,
Filled with souls who are not here but There.
I choose to breathe the clean world's air again
And not the stinking breath reposing in
A sepulchre.

Here grass grows brown and has no flowered gifts
Set down by loving family for show.
Yet still is it more pleasing to the mind
To lie on dying parched ground than to step
On land of pulchritude made for the dead.
And when I die, please cast me anywhere
Or burn me in the centre of the town
Or give me to a hated relative.
And think of me as but a passing dream
That sought to take the sum of your largesse
But never you impose seraphic dress
On memories of me as I did live,
     For no one can or should conceive
     What happens when we from a mortal’s ken gain leave.

I - The Sound Abattoir

Crisp fractal, sunlight
on new-day sweat.
No one inside knows
about the new day yet.

Forms **** and spin
and they toil not.
Skeletons can sway
with impulse 'til they rot.

Crush-a-pill with rosy tint
to last you all the night.
Catch-a-number 'neath your tongue
and later you'll revive his Fright.

Pleasure, fleshly grimace
scours the brain against the skull.
Apartment movement never stops
and starts and sweat-sheen from the pull.

II - O Androgyne

I cannot see the world for his broad face.
The smell of sulphur would be welcome but
To choke the alcoholic reek he brings
By clutching him to me in slick embrace.

I gain his absence when I ask for breath
And he, the smiling nitwit, must consent,
So I duck to the streets with haste and breathe.
A moment in my father's sight is death.

He could not know the life that I now lead,
And all the misery I rail against;
My form is set upon the grind of days
To starve in hard-brick walls of earthly need.

Moonlit ******* strips charm from the sick
And faces all too masculine leer back
From windows; prostitutes with glitter hair
As deathbed cries of need cut down the quick.

III - A Solomon Grundy Secret

I will be, as a child,
Crushed under black boot
and throttled with Belt.
Taught to be the Man we were.

I am, as a man,
disciplined with the
golden silence
and icegrip of
solitude. No one knows
my stigmata better than
the Romans that wash
their hands of me.

I was,
as graying
Figure
nearing death,
too late to
utter any-thing of
Weight
at my
dying,
Last
breath.

Part One: Wolves and Chokes

Children are such wolves.
A day is a fledgling lamb
That can be crowded, cloistered
And clawed.
I used to speak to you and
Run with you.
You in your red coat

And I with my white throat.
Suspect nothing.
No tooth was fear to me
For a pack does not stack
Its white edges against itself.
Yet still I must have itched
A miracle of irritation
That cannot be ignored.
In the night, my mouth
Is drawn wide.
Like a fetus, I am transparent
And cringing in black situ.
Then a bite, and then a bite.
Then you see what is inside.

A one I love the best of all
Is loath to see me live.
The bitter taste of childhood vow
Comprises all I give.

I’ve broken you, you say.
With a box of fools I never sought,
Always galumphing back to me.

You broke me first, I think.
What posturing, straighten that halo
That chokes me rightfully.

Of course there is no way
To seek out your paradise.
Not if sinners cannot speak.

Part Two: Sebastien

Your hysteria is a fine rope.
My tree stands ready at the dawn,
A line of men and my
Brick wall that chips and splits
When bodies fall.

Even the sun is watching.
No one swats the stinging gaze
Away and no one dares offend.
But I stand.
I shall try to be as salt.

Salt stands even as dust.
Salt sneers at wounds.
Salt loves only the earth.
And the earth will love me soon,
Championing me as her lover
Which is an irony too ghastly to feel.

Rain in the still air, in the sun.
Silence that grinds a heel onto wrists
That steals from me.
A second, then a heartstring.
Thousand and thousands.
Eyes and minutes.

A billion is still only a tenth.
Release.
It is the boundlessness of the sky
And a chorus stabs their shovels,
Stabs the vein with silver mirth.

god touches me.
I am touched by gods.
I am born
And slain by daylight’s pink
Hands.

Every iron finger
Every one a steely tongue
Every cut a golden affair
And the spurns too hot to hold.
I fall and fold and dim.

My hour is burnt
And still your eyes, your teeth
Go with me
To forge both of my decades with
A gilt life of ecstasy I never
Touched but saw.

I saw it in the face of god.
And heard it as a note
That echoed through the days I lived,
And every word I wrote.

Yes, I think it would be fine to say we are the
Sun and the Moon, respectively.
The world and sky of our disparate souls
nicely encapsulated.
To simple metaphor.

Yes. But it is incomplete, you know.
For sun may never touch moon,
and Day has no place in
the dominion of the nocturnal.
And the moon can have no adequate
view (but a sidelong glance) at
man and Earth in the sun's hand.

No,
I can touch you and you me.
Still more, I can see you and grow familiar
with what you beam upon;
Lie with the subtlety of a new night's
descent with my eyes twinkling
nonplussed to the crux of neck and shoulder.

Yes. We are, you and I, the Sun and the Moon,
if you say we are.
For you cast back the dark and shun the
dark places.
And the thin veil and living line that keeps
days apart, the Night, is the one corner
upon which I fear you shall never
Intrude.

Stop. Become fluid.
Flow from your body to elicit a secret congress.
Drip away from your eyes
and fill the outline of my vacancy.
Meet me as I was and sleep
that peace in the warmth I
bore but no longer occupy.

And I will stop. Become gas
and seep unnoticed from too, too
solid wakefulness.
To the darkest corner of the
night sky and the brightest
glint of heat between particles.
So that you can touch naught
but my outline.
And feel but the passing breadth
of my hot breath.