…your HEART, a stump, grows,
it BREAKS, i nourish the RINGS.
See how much i LOVE…

“Travesty,” those orange words spilled across the highway lines
Came on swathes of a stilled
And perfect evening time,
‘Tween buffeting air and screaming music
It seems but a step in a cyclic progression,
Or the lines that commence
This processional of cars
That follows, to the site, trails of incense,
Tears of mourn and memoirs.
Towards the hills canvassed in reluctant ennui
Jutting in the shadows the bleached ribs and pearly jaw lines
That, at times, may have looked alive, yet now
They rest static as the dead ought to be.
I sense I’m getting close, the ***** surges its triumph
As it does the sanctuary,
My head swells with deep booming sound,
The lyric of the preacher without need to expound,
Too late as the ***** shan’t stop or abate
As I pass through churchyard admonished “Hell,
Is truth realized only too late.”
Though I am soothed by that song of my youth,
Lyric’d by many-a familiar cadence and tune
Vestiges of naïveté play on the lips
But, “Hell is truth only realized too soon.”
I wait at its back and reminisce
The coming great years were something to fight for
With life, defend,
But I now see that I spent those last seconds
Waiting for them to end,
Whilst prayers of hollow wind abound
Escaped to show something holds on, at least
Pretends,
Will remain after me, aft’ I’ve settled in the ground,
To be as a sunset and come back around.
I feel like a sun, burning in fury,
Not simply a shimmer in the vastness afar,
Or the muddy face of fetid puddle
Simply rippling like a star.
Keep driving! Don’t cease my tiny hearse!
Just now do I hear the mourners’ verse,
It sounds so golden and couldn’t get worse!
But the ***** has ceased,
The daylight, it rots
(Never mind that, I’ll charge it with haught!)
And the processional laughs as they go to their plots
Their verses fall too coward to brave
The ice and the snow that is to come, mine fall stricken
With every sense of the word ‘dumb,’
But the sun reassuring with it warmth-giving rays
Will be sure to put flowers next to our graves.

Often, in the day, the tickle begins its havoc
One where the answers my head rested on
Beget those questions anew,
Begetting more questions, their answers, too
I, with upright, beating breast, am fit to take on such a feat
To sing out fame and knowledge in the streets,
They shall know what I mean,
The truth is all and everything I mean.
Wracked by what seems a natural progression
From confident concreity to existential congestion
And subdued by chiasmatic coughing fits,
Beginning with the first, ending on the last
Confounded by the night where last may come first,
I got to bed discomforted, a few shots in me,
Knowing not what to blame: me or everything,
Who is it that makes no sense?

Staring at the dreamy ‘scape
I can see the algorithmic lynch pin
Taper off and down
Fantasies, angels spread their wings
And marvelous oceans rend
There at the bottom, or there in the sky,
Or in their middle-way
Is the delible surface with wanting cajolery
Written across it, “thou may.”

Fog billows over to company, drear,
Of the sad wide river, armadas of mud
Charged to go forward yet locked as they appear,
Where I am in constant motion, confined to constriction.
Noon is never as bleak as it is now
Growing ever darker
With bags beneath its eyes
And the shining sun a novelty
A flag of finitude the morning star flies.
Take up the banner since this land is conquered
Emblazoned in every miserable seam,
The mark of tragic mien.
And if this is my greeting into the world,
Surely it’s my way out,
Awakened and forced to the blurry line
Between the oughts and desires against
From here to dreams, then permanence
No other want plagues them, also, like this.
Then I’m in the company I can call my kin
Who shall greet me as I greet the day:
Et panem meum, et fratrem.

A nectar lingers in the midnight,
Empty is the forum for all thought akin
Confused, reflected, or bade to come in
Or to come out.
With loose time the moonlight was bought
Playing with the chatter I hear desiring me:
To write a love poem with all its proper irony.
A thing of gold, I fantasy it
Though blurred and warm as lighted wick
Midst the darkness tall, timbers thick
The lenses, its vital antecedents
Are cracked or compelled by the acts of man.
Yet, so good the tools, these fragments of
Ears, eyes, and nose,
They produce all the power behind poetry
And find all I need, like a handless compass
Forcing me to follow the moss
That warns two strangers must first meet their paths
Before they may cross.

Two frowns wait for the other to speak:
One long and melancholy,
The other expectant, so fraught and weak.
The boy looks to his dog as though to his lover:
“I wish I could give you everything you wanted;
Life only interferes.”
His mate saunters on, lays low
So he fears, in resignation,
“What is it that keeps your devotion so clear?”
She, silent, in anticipation
“I do not know,” he responded. “But it is not here.”
So the blank canvas continued to be:
His mate continued sniffling unknowingly.

Earthen roads spring alive with berm-gardens,
Thistles, and animals’ connive,
A country road the blows the dust
Off the porch, so that it’s just
Us.
When the time comes
that we arrive to claim the hills over there,
Command honey evenings
I, the colt, you, the mare
Transformed by winds, raw from the pastoral
Over-there,
It gives to us the boundless open dome
Free to graze
Free to roam
Where we shall know finally what it’s like to be home.

The homes, they spring by diving arms
Growing strong and respiring clouds
Of coaly waste
That eat the clarity of austere farms
And every life of put-upon
Denature, contorted as the victim-fawn,
Bloating with guts the hue of oil
Strewn by a semi’, in two drawn
An image that takes some getting used to.

And yet, this is only natural to be one with the aluminum blood
That runs in the veins of pale concrete to its beating heart
A healthy babe born of predation
A community called Animosity,
Where a life affirmed is a life denied
Though it be a bridge ‘cross chasms to prosperity,
Hold it close,
For they are deep and one United States wide.

The entrails rot on the city face, spelling out
“Payment,” on the pavement, the street
Maggots reeking, thriving in carrion
Smiling as they urge me, of course
Carry on,
That all will be well in time.

My beautiful mare turns from the hills
Her eyes now glow cinereal
How wretched she stands my side
Her heart now a mirror for how mine feels:
Drawing on love, the general kind.
Such life of hers
Such of mine
Betoken a passion, in its turn, an ill
Then to two ridges, shorn by pure will,
And still we congeal two passions to fill it
‘Till a fibrillating heart beats the color
Of ****.