The cracking and clatter of ice from the shingles
Is my overture—
The woken cardinals,
My chorus—
Both hailing proud to me, their Caesar
And his triumph of Spring.

Snow sublimes and bleeds on the pavement
Like YHWH’s flood—
The earth will clean itself, having given birth,
It licks away the treated salts
That offend my foot and step—
Quelling there, the wrath on Gomorrah
Giving wife back unto Lot,
Or so it can be said.

Unjustifiably, I feel like a badass
With newfound swagger and perspiration
Down my back—
I shed my second skin in the virile breeze.

So, up the noise and whet your words
It’s time the poet took herself back
And without fear makes due on nothing but life
To die early and die right—
We’ll stand naked on a precipice
And scream out the world’s song
While we imagine ourselves there.

I was annihilation in that moment.
The very element of fire became my being,
I was pure destruction
And the fertile soil that comes from it,
The very act of begetting
Is the very act of rending
I stood between both in furious vigor.

Left behind us, that questioned absent mise-en-scène
With gods compassionate speaking over me;
Carelessly deliberate staves of notes rise off the pastiche
To push the soul above the throat through to the hubris of Man
And while his brushstroke unpaints the painter, and a lucid camera shutters free.

All things arise from unities as fibers from the music sheet,
A horn of violet magnitude triumphs beyond the bore concrete,
It cuts below the rest, the merit, teasing to the very womb
Of beauty, raw and eager as primitive desire; he shows to us a tomb
A snapshot of myself the author, of us authors, born again and again

And he sits smug to the side, his cigar as long as libido.
Our bodies are substance on which and of which are drawn
From the comely purple man, patient and ******, he bears
For the very law of beast commands a stable mind,
Captains the aesthete unto the intrusive hole from, for which he writes

For which we create: in that, we find the hungry impetus,
Mothers and fathers in the same moment, with abandon
A moral of such empty stuff pulls from me spirit, spirit, spirit
Of the living wager, my life, as the music man, as the purple man
Ensconced by *****, comes to me: thus is proposed, thus is empowered

Poesis brought me close to the thing of God, poetry brought me from
And beyond, and I dedicate myself to escape from the ******* of art
But run back, and back, and back to the sole recourse to be made.
I can only ride, and writhe to feel the ****** of creation
Let it take hold, let it take breath, rise immortal o’er this infinite little death.

Such to break surface, the framed glassy pool reflects
With me, upright, the still-life foregrounded as its own
Pale imitation. But I see it, there, between my vague eyes
And evaporating pores populating a single empty window
Devoid, a full of life—or so I am to believe.

That tree is happy, incomplete and passive, wayside,
It contemplates its own dream, nostalgia is its willful present
In the moment, there are but ripples in which the tree smiles
Happy to know it is here, it is alive, it is me—just as my fading
Bliss is real in the glass. I am happy for the tree: being of difference.

What never can be, it shall, in spite of metaphor
To be like is to be, but too pure be is to abhor.

It turns, a rebel, from the pool: no fiction of cast nor questioning;
That plastic Narcissus cannot hear the Echo of a captured face:
Where Exit signs sigh in their own irony trapped, here, there,
It is by its own imitation it must comfort the erraticies—
Sadly, she weeps uttering the same mantra on her lips,
But by design, she has curses on her brow, anger at her mimicry
Which hides her from the dream she lives, still weighted by
Wonder, still holding onto God. She sees nothing but the calling back.
Is but the voice of a Lover, of trapped souls in a tenement window,

She can only hear herself talking infinitely
Presence to the water, commune her ‘I’ unto me.

While I am free to glide about the room, the panoramic view
Of two minds’ madness, I, too, feel a pool on which my beloved Self
Reveals to me the seconds it took to create,
The voices which, vague, came as mine
And I stole away quietly, to believe me a tree, and to go ahead and dream.

1?
2?
3?
4?
5?
6?
7?
8?
9?
10?
11?
12.

The sun rose pink over Lancaster;
Its frozen rains came quick in tow—
Here, we sense the passive and the active:
To take the drag or pull:
He is dragged by the way of the automatic hand-to-mouth;
The Other, is my command—
But that, even, impelled snowfully toward
A closed fist, a locked grasp, an unwilling departure.

I suggest a dislocation somewhere in parallax:
Take paper dimensions and fold them 104 times
And everything flattens out—
The ocular inversion becomes like-real; I’ll swim in that!
Puddles are dragged by the wind, whilst the pull thinks in spite
Of I, its strange corpus of author, and opus
Drags to the creature of appetite deign to call to order.

But a power powerless to its name given it:
Destined desiring of sunnier metaphors—
The alcoves of the thread, brought to just us
Caesuras of what satisfies, in food, in just us
The depth of image holds true: one cannot live on bread alone.
Thus, I muse and mull back to locks of hair and bellybuttons
Waiting, in time—the deepening of time’s cloth
Where my hand caresses her thigh—
One can feel the gravity pressing on the heart,
All the love that self-reflects, combs out the wrinkles,
And has faith in the good inertia.

By this secular host consubstantiate
And Other (surely a pleasing affair) is but moments away.
And she and I look so pretty together,
Our is of whom and what and the third conditional.

That which presses upon itself, the one dimension,
Cannot disentangle from name or alliance, nor faith,
Greedily picking at the oily ruptures, effulging in transparence,
Contradictions care not for astrology,
And whether you are poetry
Is not important here.

At the swell of music I can fell the intersection of screaming of voices
They, like me, have been waiting for years
The plentitude of the thousands’ cadences
Are for the hunted, are the hunted
United, we stand in. This is unworthy, unworthy
Bestilled, we are here, standing like statues
Quietly, unquestioningly, indebted to ourselves
They said that, they said that: the mother voice
The mother’s voice
Oh, in the change of meter, she laughs and coos the answers
Your answers: we’re eying,
I’m the umpteenth man. Always. To ask,
Uncontented by the simplicity of the question, or the answer
Struggling for its complications, so, at least,
It can be done, it’s yet complete.
Wish against wishes, a silence doesn’t care
Then again, neither does the noise. Neither does the music.
If it were but love that made the moon rise, the moon rises
The ******* moon rises, it would be sorry night
A sorry state of affairs. Rest knowingly, and endure
The calamities of waning stars, twilight, and the coming day,
Marvel in the complexity of speech, and twine my fingers,
We’ll make it through.