Even the diviner was bemused by these channels, lost in my palm
Amidst the faults and erosions the like as November
Where, banal, it caught these skipping stones, day-to-day, arranged
For the radical saccades to pass, engross, my attention through the magic,
I now stare at Delphi, what binds the assumed catches
Bound, itself, to shy
To shy away from their centers.

But, now and then, my eyes will sojourn from my wanton ways
Through terraces of an empty map,
Where, by degrees, are shown their invisibilities in place of illustrations
Accoutered as décor, but fact, hastening a spider’s game:
Fixed in a drawer, renewed, splayed, drawn at constant.

These pickings, righteous, at a nail and toying on a salty lip,
Quiver, from the rector, day and night, pronouncing
Idle me, idolatry, standing at spreading concourse,
Till, evermore, my stumbling thoughts lose themselves
In my hand.

The hand.
The palm.
Lost channels flood themselves silt-rich waters boatful and boastful
Take on the name of fjord and trinity,
At which I stand, beside myself, and him, beside himself
More engrossed by far-flung ecstasies,
Quite-clear those instabilities, reaching for liquor—mid-shelf.

I could, perhaps, blind myself to the valleys—simple marked sleight of hand
But, travail those four peaks and their straining caps of snow
Unknown, it is but the larger picture, sewn to sinew runs of hair.

Too much, I plead for direction or sign, getting lost in mirrors or rhyme
These new utterances in the back of my throat, where, precisely,
Is the seat of pride,
Each a reckless trail back to the temples of uncharted weathered skin
—The vaguenesses that she enthralled, as to what I am read
Thinking nothing at all and, he, the friend of ever
Under the same stars to the north, south, in every direction.
So helpless, cold shaking and pensions of the moon, anon,
I read as the distance, empty candescences that thirst to know
Exactly what they should have known, where clairvoyance falls short
Steps, like quite brushstrokes: one at a time, wide, unending.

Their eyes did the judicious scan down to our shoes,
Muddied silence gave us away,
Cartographers of the naughty ditch we huddled in for warmth
Alight go the zip-lock bags are knuckles giggled in
Pulling the drug like creativity,
Often enough to it portraiture;
Spacily, we followed their eyes, lay flaccid fixéd
To there, they stay, when precautions cross and made
Punitive pleasures of the proxies, and all.

Rest assured, we did not care.

Blush for the dervishes, aslant, a chin
Ravaging to the eye, a glance, a smile,
Hoping a spin, awry a touch is enough to motion the room
Sheepish, onto the other,
From there at poles and solemn way: yearning.
Sticky lips, servile mementos
Wishing to be the real thing, palms
Inexorable ones, warmly tie loose ends of the world
Together, sharing as some do the spectator’s space
So twain between him and the moon: mind, body, soul
A coupling of felicitous breadth
And her come-hither stare, clung to lusting silence
Dim, in throes of mere taboo, they stay
Safely, that personal place, the jeers of teenaged love
They buried under blankets to escape.

Rest assured, they did not care.

“Replay, diligently, the last song and keep,” she said,
“Your sarcasms to yourself. I lived it before
Before, oh, it fell all into place; the fiction of photos
Will not keep food in my mouth,
Turned down in nostalgia—to be birthed
Is first in the long thread of loses,
Doled out in tips, the ringed coffee, holding each other together
While I move between tables too eagerly,
Unwelcomed contentment
Wears the dancer’s shoes mockingly
A still-life, still life just gets it, the sad times
Are written, my still life has bills to pay
Arranged like puerile bursts, blossomed hearts
Wanting to pull you through the hole in the earth
And show you the center/poetry buried in still
Lifeless end-times we gave up for access
To green roads of experience and all their contradiction;
The rest was all just small talk.”

Rest assured, she did not care.

Her and I wept away from the palpable, at feelings
Knowledge of solutions to pathos, Love begs itself
Remediation, wrong at every turn, swiftly
Excising its possessions:
Do you love me, or is it ought?
Do I love you or merely the thought?
Long, is it, to have or be—
An aspect of a thousand chattering sounds
Plentitude of voices harken answers we
Bear not to hear, but form in the absence
Bliss, enscribed on parchment, out lovely whole
Complementing our moon,
Bringer of the yeasts of child, of its own siege
Full of what we’ve only given room.
I say, recourse for our maddened state, what we promise
In rhinestones, bands us together, in too small a space,
Too short a time, is that of theft and thing—
Undo, undone the marks the sane voices’ command
We, thus, are to be lectured, tongue-in-cheek
The portmanteaus of proper affection, bed-pleasures: individuality,
Its arithmetic and the modals virile, my destiny divisible
Or walk divided, infinitely one,
Autoerotically in praise of my bottled ***, given to all,
Shared with none, taughtfull-wellknown
A love may never love but itself
If it has choice between—it chooses self,
Indulge, indulge the unlovely ecstasies sure
All lessons lead to conclusion, different in their by-ways
Restlessly falling short of dreams, for the fallen fruits
And sour with despair.

Rest assured, we did not care.

—To me, a dream, in which she came: Mistwalker
—And I, a vessel, rose in her womb, bear this, to me, a dream.

Say, on this, untoward, the spiced breezes with salt
Came, if all, the light enkindled like whetted steel
Morning star through the mournful faces above
Rejected, yes, by their mothers, of past and now,
A cold came ashore, ancient besieged accounts
Wilted the pregnant vines of yesterday, sure to
The next, as gods turn to myths, stories to the dying young.

She stared, of memorials in print
Off into the terrible morning, gossamer filament
Swaddled at the breast, a tight form slack
In the great divorce of sea and sky,
Standing, contemplative, shouts and echoes crack
Unheard, discarded: sweets to the profane
Sedately, to that dark curve: a canvas was lain
Adrift on aether, drowned bones of Atlas,
Emerge on drift of the everlasting, there at world’s end
In curved states between:
Hell broods in the burgs of ice, Providence
Forsaken of she who becks on the entombing sands.
Thus, prayers come whetted
With none to brush the stray hairs from those astray
Men conceiving valleys, their mountains,
Structures, are we, to eternally pass the course of solitude
Under cross-borne tuitions, marbled elders’ auspice
Embossed of the very tongue spoken
Once in high infant chambers, Omnis Ipse?

I, too, was born beneath the hero’s breath,
Taken by the glimmering sheath and steeds
To the awful wiles of merciful truth,
She to the enemy of standing beyond, within.

If ever a summer had kissed the city where cold descends
Or snow reminisced stars in the eve,
I, I—she hurts in the mists—have only tasted, bitter,
Sketches, between them, the finitude of their light,
That of warmth, of compassion
Man fall distracted from, therefrom grace,
A beast shed of its other back, hubris of its wing—
Am I the maiden of its song? But it’s maiden?—
One season, ever-aged, harbinger of this isolation
What is the ****** ewe years of searching for I,
Is sacrifice, thus becomes the phantom, the slave
Of that distant black, the sullied mark, consumptive
Unremitting arms of purpose, of man’s calling.

These hands are spelled, veined by charcoal dust
Adversarial oaths kept close, of myself, in idle play
Where what I will, wills but a will
Where none are to come, but the mast of a hero
Whom she is tied, of those winds
Seminal of her words—I shall be the breath
The cusp of every storm which blights the high waves,
The knife of sheer walls of stone,
Moments of oblivion which rend the heroes, ill-stayed.

Eyes burned holes for the starlight of awe
Pouring o’er the wastes of her paper skin
But, that she overturns the rueful words
Again, again, again, cycled in the oceans,
Where gardens of kelp revile the current
Strands, becoming of the arms she wishes to hold—
To write myself out of comprehension
Is to risk the very marrow has I obeisant,
These lusts of the greater body, those of the Mother
Clad in jewels and customs, as wave desires sky;
A journal I’ve become.

Mist came, froth, the spiral of wars inside the heart
They inveigled her, to my dismay, to the blind air
No longer, the sweet tine of imperfection of voice,
Inspired of spoken word, recent memory took leave,
Ambivalent joys came raining on a pen,
Reluctant to write homage to freedom,
Caught in the morphless air, calcified transformations
Odes to let go. But.

This early winter has already slipped from the macadam,
Bloats the creek I see
From the perch of rusted manhole covers
Their tunnels rush with concrete.

It falls over the v-shaped Two-Log dam,
It whispers to me
I’ve come close to
Nothing, to nothing, to nothingness,

I’ve heard the babbling, the incomprehensible echo
Of my own voice
In the abyss of being, that, if I spoke
It taunted back, in a voice
Rife
With truth.

Redemption of solidity has me now,
This is where I grew up:
Along the same creek, along the flow and course of man
Crossing the winter’s water has proven
Test, trial, and victory
Every time. I never noticed it.

Apathy is a vague blur in the saccade of the last few years,
Self-destructed by the fault of feeling.
I am more human now, returning to the shores of limitation,
Of the piercing history
Still young, but wizened, hard, a court
At which I stood and begged for my head.

I have but my name now, and nothing to return to
But the temporary homes with temporary people.

If I said I don’t care, I was wrong. They were my temple,
But the god of me, the god of them, the god of sheer youthful joy
Has been overtaken by grapevines, by ivy

And I still proclaim victory, still proclaim
I won the fight of isolation.

From the frozen bed of silt and winter
I pull concrete chips from the bridge
They destroyed ten years prior, where once I stood
And added my sorrows to the ebon stream, carrying it
To the end of it, where end met end,
And continued on end-to-end.

But I have seen nothing and no end it quite like it,
For every shore has its mirror,
And beyond it is my voice, I cast out,
Calling back,
As it was.

I know I think the best
When surfing across the internet
Or scanning a page for class
Some forum
To shift my ******* towards,

Whether to impress, or to forget.
It’s all the same.
I do not laugh at the right time
And end up in breakdowns
When I’m confronted with the actor that is also me.

Call it fraudulence if you will,
It’s a means to ends of the perfect relationship
I’ve fictionalized in my head.

I’ve fallen in love with falling love
And get off to just holding hands and feeling wanted.

Does memory bless me the inspiration to write down in verse
Some alternative that proves, I know,
Useless
In the long run?

Are the psychologists right?
Am I destined to die by my own hand?
My own pen?
By cause of my own disposition?

Thoughts of suicide, depression, endless solipsism pervade
My little godless world.
Poetry solidifies it.

*******. ******* whose rejection is undeserving of my hatred
Whose own life is the object of my own stupid, adolescent, immature mode
Of healing, whose subjectivity, whose humanness
Is of its own design and accord—I do not own you
You are as you are: not mine, but your own.

And I hate you because you do not oblige me as I think you should
You do as you ought, as you do—

Is this what it feels like?

Where is there happiness if not for in the end?

A quiet revolution
Flashed its little white flames across the distant hill,
Its pockmarked mirror throwing
From its sudden arrest
The furry, the passion, the tumult
Back.

They burn, foreseeably fade
Such its pastiche make-up, a portrait
Of lonely little people, effaced by a vague hope
Faintly the earthen hues in which he melts.

Do I dare look with him, with her,
Towards that jutting alcove upon which
Its determined optimism finds its end
Recurrently?
I run my finger along the surrogate river line:
A whole, telling narrative—
Makes me question the lack of detail, the crude
Blotches casting shadows, deforming
Reforming, waylay the blankness
I swear, is put upon.

Hands, it says, I say,
Were once in one, drawn together as drawn in twain:
Instantaneous, as a second thought—
The cold bound them together,
Blue is transfixed on the exhaustion of intensity
They burn frigidly against
Cast from the Eden of their own hearts
Their, the single one, intensity
Leaving them bled out and scattering into the world,
Helpless to the waves of idle chatter,
Helpless to directions, east-to-west,
Helpless to the fantasies of mauve peaks abroad
Goading the stars to glimmer filthily
The feeling whose glimmer thusly ceased
If only circumstantially.

They become one with the road, recovery
Surely falls fat fruitily, under cover
Of evergreen arms, protecting ‘till then, pagan sprites,
Make due—
If you cannot hear the sound of the city far off
If you, faithless, in the endless road
You will understand when one with the earth
The forest promised emptily,
As my gaze just handed them off
To nonexistence.

Take breath of the almighty pearly city!
It holds its own hand, all they could drink in
Drunk off their own
Drunk off blithe luck—to be drawn into the world
Blurring with careless craft into the other;
Toast to our contrast!

I raise an invisible glass with diffidence—do they hear the music?
Do they dance in the eyes that hurt their hearts
Do they wonder of the other? Of what was sacrificed
To inspire quiet contemplation?
I’m witness as this reluctant martyr
Contemplates their eternity, bereft of salvation,
The other may, in the tip of the brush, alighted with red
Soaked, flecked like whiskers
With collusion and abandonment, still call out.

But, the spectacle can only fade; their gates were closed
And I am, sudden, brought to the other pockmarked mirror,
The rude proscenium, marring and barring
Those hands from ever touching.

Never should this have been the foundation
For the house of faith.
And out into the world, I tread,
On to see it tomorrow, cast in similar light.

So upset am I by desire, a want that extends to another.
How unfair it must be on the other side of this transaction,
Invisible.

To think each day is the same evolution of the same sentiments
Rising and falling under the same horizon:
I see it as my own tendencies

Wake, contemplate, fight with myself, eat, elate,
Fall asleep with contention—no dreams
Want to sleep next to me.

For it is the root of philosophy to have your other half—
I am completeness without my other half whose existence
Is questionable,

Is irrespective of fate and, frankly, unaware. Yes, we’re all
Philosophers to the grave, to the ebb of human passion,
Of which I’ve been bereft by forces apathetic to my demise

I am alone—shall I always be? These and other serious questions
Come from misery. You’re a placeholder for something I lost long ago
And my watch is endlessly caught on the twenty-fifth hour

Unmoving.
I want to not feel alone—and so that is my relationship
Concerning the other person, whom is rightly not here

I am too wrapped up in the concept to think of others as people
But means to my own happiness. I am ultimately the selfish one
The only difference between me and other people: success.

Drink and bleed: defining moments in my life to discover both
So my problems can take on their own lives and breath,
And there is my distraction, my face in the display window at a zoo.

Though, if ever I were to break through the clouds, I would not
See paradise, nor if I looked down, see cities in the lake—no, there would just be
Another film too high for me to puncture. I can float in the endlessness,

Uncertainty glimmers like angels across the bold nighttime sky
I let the inertia move me, let poor mood speak my piece
Until I, like all other human interaction, fall out of place.

If I could be your guard of solitude, the shadow of your light
I would gladly stay, half-starved of oxygen
For then I'd be strong enough to cope with falling out of place.