How jealous am I
At poetry?
That simple words make the lovely firm
And compact shadowy abstraction?
Every letter holds a bitter love
A fiction made with zeal,
Drawn from pinpricks, imaginings,
A fiction I made real.
Within them, sit, the cloth I weave
My heroic darling love exists
There, sobriety is leastways bearable
And pen to paper I can’t resist.
I see perfection—her complexion,
Written out in words
But she is so stolid
And doesn’t move
Her features fade when I admit,
Stale enterprise, the poem done
and the page I promptly quit.
Rife with guilt and melancholy
I’ve done impulse injustice:
Concretizing the unknowable,
Left caricatures incomplete.
Despite the sense, here, stacked before me,
The envy for this poem
Because it has a solid grasp
At the prickings of my heart.
And still, what have I
And what have he
But two-side written jealousy?
For more words that breed a love
Of which I, voracious, hunt,
More beauty, more glamour, rosy viscera,
Give poetry that fallacy,
That fallacy I want.

A glinting, like starlight
Hides deep beneath my eye
Surrounds itself, impenetrable
Never wanting to be found,
Though, in my breast it beats aloud
Beating this awful, heart-like sound
I spurn and spit and hate the sound
And bid it go away now.
Despite that voice, my searching seeks
--The cosmic heavens,
--The infinite blue,
(What deception starlight can do!)
My planted feet
And fixed gaze
Envy comets passing by:
Not to stand and wish at stars,
But to watch the earth
Pass deep beneath my eye.

Light from a prism
These petal’d flo’ers grow
Breath in weighty breaths
Versicolor whispers that quietly follow.
They step alongside you
And spring in veneration
In the alluring prints you left behind,
Like groves from every indentation.
But, it’s the same
Where her footfall goes
--Abreast the creekline
--In grassy seas,
--On the concrete
--In the seconds that pass by me.
I so want,
But one flower
To fill up, reserved for that one fair.
Still, though I grab
For my partnered hand,
Thieves on breezes steal them away
Wilt, as I pluck
Flowers from the footpath
And look ahead
To see no flowers
Wilting nor even dead.

They asked me what I saw
In the mirror of the sky
Like direction on a map
Or maybe a loving big, blue eye?
I had no heart to say
None of it
But constellations
Illumed to me that way.
What error befell me
As I ran my fingers
Through the space
In between,
Naming them all,
Every brilliant tail seen;
Every Pyxis,
Every Ara,
And the Gemini Two
Hailing to a name
Which they don’t belong to.
What a fool I am
To call the whole heavens
By one fallen star,
When they still
Spill, infinite, onto the black mirror ahead,
While I watch and wait
For them all to fall
And watch and wish
That I had never
Watched and wished on them
At all.

Tinderbox pt.1—Magic
At first,
I caught its eye
In the rolling smoke of fire
I ****** my hands
To pull it out
And speak with lighted words,
In light of brilliance,
A vital warmth,
But in the end just ashes.
And then,
The curve of silk waters
Which rushed upon and through the rocks
Wrote to me
A rich and liquid poetry
Not in bursts but subtle waves
I cupped my hands to catch its words,
But even then,
I could only hold so much
And only for so long.
               Tinderbox pt. 2—the Artist
Entranced in the world
Here and beneath the moment,
In the spaces and each letter
I saw the fire, the waves of silk
Each play in their environs,
I’d grieve
At their perfection,
Running my eyes over their hilly peaks
And dreaming mine had been there.
My worlds were ugly, incomplete
Extinguished at very moment
That the two would meet
The tinderbox was fire to my hands,
My cup was rife with holes
And there, I’d thought the artist dead
Or never even alive.
In my sleep I’d hear a voice
Like Milton, Coleridge, or Shelley
A babble arresting and forcing pity
From its infantile lucidity...
I knew this thing, but killed it.
Perhaps even now, I believe in magic
Though, to pluck rain from a furied storm
Or converse with tiny sparks
That become
Something of brilliance and solemn silk
That groves were wrought from tiny seeds
Long after mere chaos
That, from it, comes a universe
and white paper is all it needs.
What awoke me was not
That there was art
But that the words had tried to say something,
Something the heart could not speak
Nor the mind would dare to reason;
It was not as much the words that made it up
But the worlds in between them.

Take punches
And smile
The big never get small.
Like dust
Along the mountainside
Take their everything
And be not at all.
Be proud, little dust
Do not fear the all alone;
Every mountain of we
Is divisible by infinite
I.
To dream of stones
Is petrified,
But how can you move mountains
When you can’t even move yourself?
Let them have their lands
That stop along the shore
Mountains stay just where they are
But you’ve got
A million and one
Other places
That wind could take you.

A little sigh,
Departure
From this world
To astral planes,
The cutting winds stop their assault
And lift tenderly
A rolling breath.
Among the stars, it disappeared
Though long before
I beat it there.
From still feet, pocketed hands
The vivid rye enwraps my palms
Whilst I, lax feet,
Walk to fields
Of the midnight flowers.
Since the sun went to its rest
Their cosmic petals unfurled
I reached up
And pinched the seeds in my right hand
And flung them across the world.
But I could not stay,
For fear of dark
Nor force myself to leave
The upright shadows that walked at noon
Though soon gone, pushed me away.
Caught ‘tween sun and night, two worse off half-lights
Frightened to go,
Reluctant to stay.
There I sway, I take their dower
Through this precious selenian hour
In the forest
And over knells
To those fields
Of midnight flowers.
Their tiny halos of a velvet white
Augur what comes: a wanting night.
And yet their whispers,
Of dimmed succor
Show me in the yawning fields
What I came to them for:
To bathe in the pallor
That falls everywhere
And clasp my shadow’s hand
To run through fields
Past the morning hours
To lose my breath
And pluck the petals
From every single midnight flower.