What’s this, again? My favorite!
Whiskey and ink, pen and drink
And blood to punctuate
It all.
Cross-out the L’s and dash off the I’s
Filling the spaces where tears used to fall,
Fill up the keys, drained arteries
And I give them to my stanzaic-self
Who weeps on command, is a comedy
Since these dramas of the mind
Often too risky for poets’ traverse
The grey imprisoned between the words
Is home and salvage for us bleeders, but
Too often
A delight
For you readers.
Can I write drunk? And let the truth come out?
I could be at the end of the barrel of my own words,
Absolve the guilt, art itself or no,
I could find the beautiful truth at the end
—And hope I misfire.
What if I’m not strong enough?
What if this kills me?
The whiskey and the pen are the friends
As much as they are paring knives
—But, never have the dark times seemed so bearable.
I get drunk off the tears I hold back
All the faces I wear,
Who, like fantasies, from inside rend and tear
To get to the top
Until the hole of suicide surfaces…
And I stand a stare, pretending it is beautiful
And write a poem about it,
******* myself to become the empty beloved poet
The suffering aloof homework assignment
The voice of sadness
The joke
The cliché,
Always and ever
To hold me over till the next day
Distracted by a different kind of self-loathing,
Through that, I can go on
To forget it
Again.
Tonight.
Tomorrow.
And then again,
Till death.

Stare at the universe for a little while, you’ll see
Something resembling you and me: a quite sobbing vacuity
Draining all pellucid stars of luster and bravery.
I won’t be home for the rest of my life, hard as it is to take in,
Something went missing in what never was
That all the timbers strip away at the passing years
In anger and patience that slapped me in the face
When I said I’d never be happy again. My pockets are full
Of icy penance for crimes distance and apathy revealed.
Shimmer do the walks ways in the missing parts of the night sky
Shaped, somehow, by you and every blazing heart
Is a comet to earth: ******* vibrantly a poorly strung bandage.
And every light to cross the concourse of hopeless prophesy
And my constructs of relative suffering, an oil-light suicide.
History is always-already the behest of malignancy, but it’s sweet
The protection as I’ve weaponized every interaction to be,
We could have been cause-and-effect and danced like
Idols, gods, and fools in the sky of our experience, but
The God of Small Things, I, bear down on dis-eases rejection.
Like surgery, the tiny cells bereft of the cause of blood, the cause
Of complaint, can do nothing but new hearts reject.

The greatest eye, seeing as I see: infinity infinitely,
Passing and being amidst mere seconds, touching glassily
Fringes of the smallest universe of me,
The happier side of the sublime, distant fingers of distant peaks
Combing the edge of time.

I’ve stared at the stars too long, we saw them dance out of space
More dimensions than a singularity, for it opens up
As hearts do in each other placed.
From fixéd gaze and placidity, I stride in awe to you
We could feel one with acatelepsy

Have what some consider few, and few consider all
Intertwined by the darkness between the dying stars’
Existence, in that both skins a whole that glistens.
Of that place, I in constant drawn, that vacuity, that candoris

A promise that, regardless what season, my face feels apricity
And careless are the places as numinous are the lariots
Whether through Hell or usurping Pheobus’ chariot
Some hope may birth within the open dark
The treasured lunar retinue, a web of inspiration, generations to come;

That’s what keeps me hopeful here, a shy star in the void
Across it all, across life-lines I shall have,
Before you ever meet me, long since dissipated—
Come out to see me and play, or are you simply? Belated?
In that web, the growing ever-on, generative swan-songs,

And the one I wish on may befall a stellar death, my sky
Alighted by one less, a part of me to the cold and shiftless earth
That though the stars may fall, these hearts may flash chimerical
Etched limpid in the palimpsest of memory, they are, they will
Hearts of the little universe, consumptive and resilient

And kept ever on, there beyond Jupiter and his moons thereof
In which chaos finds itself bathed and bound by Love.

1
We read the Titans in a ***** binding, stitches
Crossing in inspiring genetic code and though
Sweet winds in Elysian plans blow, peppered
On the fertile mind, great poets sowed these realms of Hell
Petite scholars pass cursorily, in attempt or ignorance
This classroom won’t appreciate, for years behind, years until.

There was substance in their parting wrists, or ninth ring
Of some divorce in descending rings of darkness and liquor,
And binding chains clasped too numbed from vacillation
I find the journey down their spiral, sad but beautiful
Who wakes with them on either side: design, ebullient suicide?

They lie before me, still vivacious, I lay on looking
In their papery autopsies revealing nothing but scars,
Nothing but the inexplicable, the inescapable prophesy of war
So distant, papery, eternally recurrent and so beyond us men,

Did you sacrifice yourself for the poem, little shred of self
For the gleam of light of day in time of the beloved belated?
What caught your heart, the one you slain, that looks past us all
But moves beyond tears—something ungraspable you had to shed
Life to attain, whose mockery was impetus, just as it was bane.

Pray tell, does it hurt to, in time, become absurd?
A living contradiction, a multiplicity, tiny strings, and blood
Black as ink and nihilism, but swooning, structured, and romance
Pure dialectic, two bodies of verse coincide; a black hole
Dark and Worse. The ultimate catharsis of poetry, lived in every line.

#2
There were abysses in those falling leaves,
Fullness of a lighted walk, irreclaimable annihilations
And empty existences. Now, we write them
Write them down, on these falling loose leaf scraps.
But what has been, is smashed to bits, eventually withering
Eventually splits; yet, something of history is fed from their breast
And we know the miseries that were forewarned.
Ever shall we follow, now that you’re died and died ever on?

To Hell with Socrates; art’s no imposter, but the rudiments
In fact it rears us philosophers, asks and answers all questions
We’re all philosophers: we know what knowledge denies,
Laughs at, and awes: the sole thing nihil cannot belie
Therefore, the pantheonic blood is spilled and I
Drink headily. Draw the same course and dark spirit
That plucks the ferns pushed through the crack
From the grains of aged monuments, past frisson of
Repeated denouement and Time’s cynosure has lent.
The poets may suffer but know what we don’t
And die just to find the panaceaic solution to death
For they, they will never die, and we will pass, unleft.

Look not into that hopeful scene, away and down the alleyway
Of your new life—new memories gambol and of them a new past,
Look not into that hopeful scene, nostalgia when comes as a new god
An infant-you beseeching you, “I’ll guide thy hand down two hist’ries.”
Look not into that hopeful scene, the past is clear and now empty
Autumn is sweet, exalted still though with this cold, and bitter will
A hopeful scene as it looks not, as car-exhaust mornings spray cool
The baby-sitter years, or days under the eye both looking in
That hopeless scene, the beauty of this never-was, never-had, likely
Never-will. For the reclaiming of past selves as wonton, fickle
As the purchase of small antiques and filling up those jars of brine
Today’s home is a present-past, recalled in ferns up through the cracks
Sure as coating on thy heart, it wants us to return, to call on
Doors that long ago inured to wailing of their theft, so it goes
And capturing the long-ago: look not into that hopeless scene.

Five years from my end of days and, shall there,
Does a verse go on tell me—was it beautiful
Like breaking windows, battered wind chimes?
I groaned to hear when history cried
That hum in Death, the silent ode, a sallow sound

Made, was your time, to sole destroy,
But, I promised your parade I would not shake
My fist to the sky—for somewhere, you would be.
Yes, absolving dreams—committing them to fade
But, yes, they fell like the snow: all around—

In the present, the past comes ‘round—ah!
My suffering is ever turning, the edges running raw.
But, I promised, I would forget—your only wish
Was n’er to be a memory, never to use apologies as
Laurels for my victory—I can’t be happy alone.

I wrote this for you some years before, long before
We were children, long before both we were born.
You danced like light, effervesced in contradiction
A love that was you-I and a bead restful in my hand
We suffered separation ‘till life, and bore flesh along.

Five years from my end of days, gold can’t travel
Nor chameleon, needless to say I knew this was one
Our parent from thence I came, to you, to me, i-you returns,
Last one last thing in darkness burns: I to see recurrently
I knew before we were ever born, all those years ago,

A dazzling iteration of extinct, mellifluous joy, that
Though on pyrrhic terms is all in all a mystery,
When five days pass we will be each other, I sleep up
And set my lips for nihility and awe, kissing at the azure bare
To float as a dream to your stars that constellate there.

There was magic at work there, some protecting veil
I felt beyond the mobile cab, gestalt, with its felt-angelic wings
Anew, I felt safe on that bend and wind of 322.
The needle at ¾ heading back the country road
From the quiet haven of West Chester, PA, towards here:
Oh, in awed—amazed the simplicity, we both looking
Back on the other: one loquacious and I speechless,
And simple was the history—a thousand stories and I
I picked mine!—Its grantedness between the golden parallels
My incipience of joy cutting through the last dust of the silos
The thronging corn and coral-bugs celebrating me
Or is it with me, that much too.
If I had never been down yon, I feel as though I’d know your
Serpentine nostalgia all along the miles’ track
As kept as if my birthright.
Beauteous a gateway to the Juniata-home, though miles
Away from here and subject to an absent roam.
Its waves may roil ‘gainst my native door,
‘Tis this your patchwork sister on which we humans drew
That equates paths, that pining name, that road 322.
And, oh, as before I knew of thou distant eyes
Despairingly all recollections of home in the Gallery
Of Autumn fruit: plucked, transient, and rotting.
This music! Music can’t help—I hear highschool in the chords
Playing in the lyrics, transformed by my design
As meaningful, self-serving words and they all burned
And brand to home if I, if I ever can again.
But where would I go, where do wizened lines end?
Written in sullen, maddened road maps, words to that history
All my own—does it write in the river, end in the mouth?
Or the Appalachian Eden, taken on the river’s vein
To my little fall of man, a threshold barred by flaming swords
That of hate and of command, miles fatten as years accrue
Go distant past the western sun,
Down,
Down,
PA-322.