There are times when they croon
a little too loud and a little too soon
Like the rusty strings of a widowed piano
that prefers to be out of tune
There are times when they speak,
spilling compassion in a timbre too reedy
Through porous tongues and lacerated gums
that have since forgotten how to believe
There are times when they remind,
a handwritten exegesis of why leaves rot before they descend
Rubbing pencil and tablet together–
one made of flint
The other, of obsidian

Before we read or speak or rest further,
you owe promise to a favor–

I want you to walk directly out of your door
during the most lucid scene of day,
or the most haunting moment of inner-night
Walk until your feet come to a
                        sudden
                        instinctive
                        halt
Listen to clamor, or
whatever surrounds you
Lift all volumes of your
                        puja
                        quietude
                        as a psalm
Focus on humanities scrapings
or the long graceful stroke of
matriarchal firman in her most
                        peculiar
                        stage
                        of cankered innocence
Lecture the calamity of her fictionless plot and
digest what the spiritually deaf cannot, and allow it to
find what triggers you the hardest
                        what
                        gouges
                        the prompts threadbare
It may be the indifferent hiss of cars passing
and it may be the expression plastering the jaw
of all of that unprocessed energy
                        ambling
                        on
                        by
It may even be the weather spilt
from her majesties
archaic entrails
Something will eventually do you in
but it ultimately
takes practice at varying degrees

I've done it when I was awake
I've done it in dreams
Either way
there's more mirrored in fragmented cohesion
                        than it
                        quite often
                        seems

I bow, a little harder than usual, over stained desk keyboard,
wondering if I even mean a word
alternating between literature and *******
So directionless, so absurd
Guessing doubles at the tap of every stroke in mind
each ******* met with loathing
and an instinctive feeling
that in this blind city
              the
seeing eye dogs all laugh,
just before croaking,
at how I'm just as ******* blind

Where do I begin?

Should it be at the height of fog hours,
doping up infallible images of affection,
among sifting smugness,
end over end in my sun-stroke mind?

Should it be it all tore down from closed doors,
every imperfection, every cyst, reworked by
some sort of Mortician,
consumed by grandeur for his practice?

Or should it be at the exact
moment
that all was realized– astuteness to
how fragile every meter of my unused offal really is?

Second to sick second, and day to well day,
all woven itself into a tapestry thats harder and harder to recall

Sew the squares, and caress the texture with tips of printless fingers
Each inch calls– no, howls –out into the basin where I sit

Howls of pain
                                 howls of stone
howls of criticism
                               howls of analysis
ripping through the brail that's sung to the bone

Tell to beg, where do I begin?