My loyalties ought to be elsewhere
Not self-respect.
Twenty-ought years
Of listening, performing
Commands in my ears
Atop the most prominent point
Of a circle.
Do I speak up and proclaim my wants,
As they have, as they do
Whose execution is one’s normative due?
Do I risk monstrosity
That grotesque
Of passivity turned active?
O, people hate the biting mirror.
Architecture worn and rubble
Precludes the fate of so headstrong nations:
A people, all leaders,
Would swallow and spite
Litter the flowers with bones
And plight.
Great structures built with power
Are levied ‘gainst the weak
For plurality would cancel it out;
It’s not imperative
Bodies of power to push for us all,
The lion’s share.
It’s more an empty cadence, mere practice
To tickle emotions
And prove, ultimately, the infallibility
Of tenets of strength and structure:
The passive are submissive
As they should.

This disconnect from the grey and cold
Of a winter’s breadth
Enough, I deem, to let me stumble bold
Pink and wrapped in baby fat
Romantic lines fit to caress.
Call this the poet’s regression: that
Urge to beautify the same alloy
Dismantle the hearth, the laying of brick
Warmly, as the walls of Troy;
Like the end of Homer’s sum
My fate in poems like that of Illium.
Spectres of the warmed men
Haunt the open air
Adopted aspects in a long-since ken
A half-toothy smile
A finesse made manifest
In the yard of Elegy’s rose.
Written in their stony vines
A chronicle of the lovely evergone
Dates and names, the last image
So manicured, so plastic,
So subject to temperament.
What real flowers can spring in rheum
I put and sob for them, time steals
As the robbers will in their tomb
Where knowledge walks beside
Hope runs on ahead.
My weapon was anxiety
Completed fear of loss
Slated but loved dossier
Or pretense of the fiery.
I cannot be certain, but that deeds conclude
Behind the curtain of the heat, fonts
On cobble, I brood with chills
Of those winter months.
Before me a new yard, rolling green
Opens for, piecemeal,
The bloodless thing called Beauty,
Quite ill equipped for my touch.

Who, I ask,
Is this phantom I pen poems for?
What ghost
Is this, apparition of my verse
And greatly its inspiration?
None; that’s who.
Worse yet,
My insistence on wasting ink away
On mysterious “you”s
Whatever, whoever
She may be.

Go
With me
Where the winds of grain
May breathe
Small atoms of woven gold
So that I may lose my own.
With the oxygen you’ve gilded
Filling our lungs—may I dazzle like you?
Two creations intervene—We are the constellations
The spider webs you see
How paltry and few
The stars, they seem
I cast them off, they sickly gleam
To fill my sky
With you.

The sun does arise
In that aubade way
It spills out over petals
Infinitely
So silent but a discourse:
A camp of brook and pale-freckled
Leaves,
A clamor of engines
Escaping the scene
Too busy, too distant
To actualize their hum.
At the intercession of wood and modern man
I stood dutiful, tenuous,
Apt to standing still
‘Tween what has my calling
And what, my will:
This aesthetic simplicity, resplendent awe
Stays with the punch-card
On my way to work
But I know I’ll stand at the edge
Once more.

Some, ode-to-be,
Never let my get so close
That I should turn to graphite
That which set notes
To a discordant symphony,
Lyrics to that beautiful muteness.
Never—I promise—will you be my poem
You’ve mastered an art
Only dreams could capture
Half as well.
You make me seek and chase
A fantasy
And long to capture what, before
I never thought.
I am left in division:
Do I love what I can’t have?
If so, how?
Do I release what eschews chains,
Arrests me having done the better?
O, then this I hear a locket
Whole, in faith, on my breast
And lest I’m to sail
Towards an in an eastern destiny
The key will blow in warm
From the west
Strangely, a pattern unlike my own
On wings that flutter
Free
And I will, somehow, hold the key
That, somehow, predates
Her western destiny.
Two lockets broken
And chains entwined
Shall render useless an eager hand
But still the palsy that urges it
Amidst the ailing hate of it:
Love in its purest.

To travel and live on a roaring ocean
A life of ebbing and flowing waves
And transformation
Is seductive to my
Ink-stained fingers
Begging to wash in the surf
To ready themselves for some journey
Ahead.
Prepare the vessel!
Call here the mark!
But only a few tick before we finally
Embark; the orange arch of salt-spray and freedom
Wade in the glass of the inert sea
Directed in the way of time’s linearity
Perhaps to a coast on only one design:
A message in a bottle
To wherever the wind calls mine
With but a simple story
For whomever it may find.