I should have lived to thank you more,
where the blue dots and the green dots
met on a stormy porch-front streaming
crack-paint, blank and dirt from years
of games on the blurry tabletops.

Years of games.

We should have walked in the fields,
you the tide swelling and falling and
ultimately disgorging universes of all
you used to know: the good and the small
and the stern and the silly and the cruel.

The good and the small.

He will take your place in the shows,
in all the nightlies and the dailies,
grey hat and black sash. He is taller
by far, and you can't look up to someone
that unabashedly taller than you.

Grey hat and black sash.

You would have made time for me between
strides on the honest diamond of the sky,
and I? I might not listen at all, but
the pearl in the glasses, those awful
brown glasses would stay with me.

I might not listen at all.

She sat with us many evenings as the
winds raked the small lights of our speech.
What has become of her, I wonder more
frequently, but sleep with my head
on my hands all the same.

Sleep with my head on my hands.

They call me under the door, they call.
They fill me with themselves until I'm out.
Just what they want from me and less. Still,
they can't tell me the good and the small,
The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.

The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.

It takes the sky to make me feel small anymore,
Ridicule from orange light
To make the ghost town fill the bluing coast.

Single silhouette, the wailing breath,
A trailer park becoming fast and
Coming near the closure of her home.

Drinking quickly stars,
The eating face of face-consumers
Touch the late-night masters, late at night-time shoppers:

Impartial is impervious, but he is much the more impious
After years blaspheming from rejections.
The magic circles spell out years

Of demons that have failed to come--
Have failed to wake the hands
And slap the machine like deviant memory can.

Hand into the cup into the hand:
Same business.

"For I am he that sways in multitudes,
The Ur-reader believing faithfully;
With words beneath my starry fingernails,
And arms attendant to the mescaline sky.
Forced blue and always empty to the face,
Blue hands against the million-houred nights.
Not blue by name but in a walking breath
Beneath the curse and cry of glinting day.
But praying's pointless anyway now that
The Seven Hands that turn the Sky have moved;
And walking with the moon can't turn me on,
Because I end up doing all the work."

There's not a ******* thing that you can do
When all the forest's trying to keep you still.

What poems do you write for me,
O sovereign brother?

What songs do you dedicate to me
without seeing my face
or knowing my name?

In what mercifully alien tongue
are your prayers of me spoken?

And by what brooks
and under which installment
of the universal moon do you stop
and pen the thoughts
of your heart to me?

In the broken colors of the earth,
I welcome you across the sea of souls
to read what I have put down
in my private books
in an ink thrice-strained by love.

"It would be a statement of complete fatuity were I to claim I had approached the venture with no measure of trepidation."* - Myself, moments after writing this poem.

I claim very little.

I claim the cold of the night as regards my own warmth.

I claim the twinge in my right ankle for no one else would, surely.

I claim what little daylight I see and that sees me.

I claim the stagnation and degradation of my soul which I allowed to prosper deep within myself in all those hurtful years I spent convincing myself that you would eventually be capable of loving me as I did you.

I am.

I am aware.

I am a vigil for myself.

I engage the world for my own ends.

I sing a song that carries no one.

I breathe only when my lungs will suffer no further delay.

I am the concept of revulsion that stirs the body instinctively, like unnecessary skin.

I am the cold entity who never felt an embrace, whose face slips out of view of the light of the flickering bulb.

I wrong myself furiously.

I rarely forgive.

I choke on the water. I burn in the deep tissues.

I feel the idea of desire, and I smell the smoke, the herbs, and the mud.

I prepare a table for myself in the presence of my infirmities, and I cannot help but look at my self between my fevers of antique wakefulness.

And I wish to God this had a happy ending.

Figure on the hill,
the vast and dark;
heinous conqueror
with single, vaulted eye.

That common passing mark
a whitish spear
who often in the morning
passed unheard.

Color in the walls,
the tangent all of space;
and I most meet
and he the thrilling knight.

Braggart of the ears,
where sleepest thou,
an curvature would bite
that runs upon the steely edge of wit?

In this repose, and let no man declaim
that music cannot work the bones of fame.

The other day in madness walked I past
The tree we used to sit beneath on days
As fury white and emerald cold as this.
To me, the tree looked clothed in common rays
But still I felt a change upon the air,
Indicative of one who would not speak
At once upon the edge of crying out
With words of import; so I heard, though weak,
"Call me and I'll divulge." Thus paused there I,
Beneath a cruel empery of thought
Not dispossessed of thee, and still I spoke,
And through the word, I have deposed thee not.

The other day in madness spoke the trees,
But what they spoke of from me ever flees.