As you flick the wand, one more time
Again in a 360 rotation, around,
From wall to door
Her lean torso serpentine coils, her mind cocked to spin
Memories she hasn’t felt since ancestors past
Nor this hunger for the hunt
Crouched low against the carpet fibers
Peeking through the lattice squares
The gaze, the stare, the pause
Of the dining chairs
The hunch, the pounce, the ****,
The finishing blow.
Grace and ferocity beyond what even Discovery could say
It’s all a game, illusion:
To catch is to win, but to catch will end the game
To chase is to win the excitement, but to lose?
But, ah, all is but frustrated
To lose, is the essence of the game
Chasing quantum excitations
Like that chance for a mouthful of pride
In pursuit
But a ghast, fleet of foot myth
She says in the semaphores of her midair leap
With delusions comes laughter,
I am the uninhibited one
Dancing for beasts.

These slights only meet me
Like a stray kiss on the cheek
The kinds you dream of at 13,
Moments made to be stretched
And puttied minutes, days, years after
The best, the most incongruous and shameful,
The most despised,
The kind that curl your toes
And sour the stomach
At that introspective drunkenness
One foot grounded, one knee tingling numb
On the bar;
Oh, she came, oh she went
Those poetical revelations at the bar
Our best ideas on human suffering
Forgotten to write down,
Fuel for the manuscript, pressed
In dirt and blood, soul and spit
Another, another, whilst all others
Run for the rip tickets and defaming hope
Each lose a sneer and a cyclical hoping.
Never once, in love or lottery,
Do you suspect
Maybe lady luck is chasing other hands tonight
While you’re chasing those loses
And maybe, leave the lotto machine alone for a spell
Yeah,
That’ll teach it a thing or two.
But who hasn’t loved vice
Just a little too close?
Whispered a promise to appetite
Before lying down for good?
I loved her like everyone else,
And it’s still a single paystub dissolved
Without recourse or cause for revenge.
But she, vice, I can share with others
Being the only thing I’ve ever thought
Of stealing
Was a glance into that torn dress
Looking for a pattern
Or that wayward hand across my cheek.

You can hear the rain as it gathers
Soaked cosmopolitan soldiers in the gravel,
Complaining of urban trenchfoot.
Those stars on their hands, declarations of evil
Felt the roughed hands of homeless men
Asking, “where you gonna be next week?”
And other cherries of vagabond greetings
Of his situational pleasantries;
The kids couldn’t say:
Topics avoided are done so the loudest—

That old man who’s friends with the devil
Lying infirm, walking infirm, his only guests are strangers
I hear his didacticisms from long ago
Curtailing the copper snakes despite their promise of knowledge
Good or evil
Because life is too short to be more than just friends.

Everyone works at least one day on the jakes
At the desk at day’s end
At plaster fist on the rivers in tar
Where Rat-prophets have their
Schizoid visions peaking in fright
To a starlit bible-edge clatter and smash
Shaking and roiling, denimized
Words pinpointing you down
Assembly-lined out by the smirking madman

Capital, he says, capital, capital
Looking out on our heads graduated heads
Cap it all, cap them all,
Jagged and four-squared edge
Happy enough to dogpaddle in a maelstrom
Called Sallie Mae
And to forget ‘graduation’ means ‘to rise’
These ocean floors, dark and darkening.

Yet, his debt crushes him for lack of want,
Chicanery and shady deals
Mine’s a blessing, a burden of love;
The brochure is a better read—

Where am I going to be next week?
Recalling the difference
Between indebted and dead
Recalling the difference
Between a ton of feathers and that of lead.

O, cry morning,      sun breaks again

In that history of banalities
Are written, I finished the cigarette
Before the coffee, twirling wind

O, sigh morning      as inverted

Could carry me to the rock wall, thinning grey,
Of the house where egos, bruised, seek guidance
The black bird builds a decoy nest

O, shy morning.         churlishly answering questions never

Asked before, “nah-uh, nah-uh, nah-uh,”
(A ****** is heard, of most[ly] fowl)
Spoken mostly to the fact:
It is what it is. Acceptance

O, belie morning.          builds a brutalist window, round by row

The they that walks whistles low with nebulous intent
To remind itself to forget
Abysm is a stranger in your city streets.

O, blithe morning.          Such cringing in place

Of those sleeping hours, parsing the drop-ceiling’s
Calligraphy: kings be draped in robes of flesh
To depose the anarchists in cerebral lands,


O, yes, my morning.                     a lechery for the heart,

That religion of my given path
Or its surrogate, the lawful rebels
Writing on every city row, so willing but rough,

My guest, O, my morning,                         such a pity!

Restless and genuflect, the they does not find itself
Swayed by the largess of absence
Craning neck eastward toward the perfect morning,
Ever on the cusp of the perfect twilight.

Branches on the path did the rest of the work for me:
All I had to do was tear the rest of the canvas off my
Vans. The rubber sole floated where I threw it, bobbed
Whitely out of view. Now, tell me we can go
To my beloved 60s, the ones I know nothing about
While under umbrella’d leaves just touching the creek
We’re stealing kisses, my heart rides on box-car hitches
And rusted out Fords, all the way to absolute nowhere
But, something mauve glows down the way, utopias
And despots and kids who gave a ****, knew what
They ought to fight for and did. Skip the ambiguity,
Stop all the foreplay, give me something real this time
While I drag my bones in a hometown I wasn’t born in
Praying the trees take back the concrete. I don’t know,
Say it’s the whiskey and cigarettes making me uneasy,
But there’s some elegance in the way I saw her move
That makes fidelity a hard, loving hand, just a little too
Hard then I’ll take my borrowed wings some vague
Direction north, past the towers of Lebanon,
Laid to rest with highschool friends, both dead
In wax and paper, tied in all these loose ends.

Water can go anywhere and I’d like to say
Where it wants to go. It screams through
A tea ***, or through the stone-sized hole
In the glass. If I shut-off from the way it
Picks up dirt in the grout, the vibrations
From downstairs will scatter it nowhere.
TV you aren’t watching becomes likes
Gossip; and below is an advertisement for
White crosses on the highway not too far
From me. This is one of many nights I
Couldn’t be bothered in, even by a calling
Star. The breath of missed time between
Us speaks to someone long gone, besides,
It won’t move me with electricity constantly
In my ears. If it happens to fall, I’ll wish on
It, in spite of facts I’m committed to for
Something slow and radical, like contentment.
Now, that’s empty and ponder-worthy, as rain
Falling from space, ready to mindless move
Across the kitchen, graciously squeezed from stone.

I gave the dog a bone
And he gives me God instead
The god, a bone, I gave;
And with that bone, he fled.
Great battle lines were drawn
By infinitives of legion-men
Both skirting around the split and splice.
But, ****, those FANBOYS can’t finish
Anything.

Monosyllables to polysyllabic concerns:
A pittance for pity resenting the night
All is well, or not.
I am the same, though less than gratified;
I am your sexlessness and wandering bestfriend
Faithfully attent to the lovers’ fight
Between the hopes longer than a day,
And the stilted, crude truth
All wonderfully thumping behind plaster and stone
In that I can make my predictions,
Perhaps because I’m a part of that love
I’ve heard it before and watched it float off into space
A repeat has no better outcome,
But we’ll always be wondering their fissures
And openness, when I abandoned care too late;
Where was apathy when I needed it most?

The day will exhaust itself if it keeps running away;
Shadows may fetch its hills as they fetch the floors—
There is all the grime of family life portraiting
Seamy corners perfumed with stale smoke
Blackened as it comes with twilight,
Narrated by cracked smiles and “some’re” teeth
Stories of the happy winds, the simple views
Pits of bromide comforts and steely prides
And all around resilience to spiting one’s face.
Even as the sky waxes intense the pink of waning day
I find no hope in the west, but a weight pressing
On the very outcropping of my birth—
These modern monks, these pretty babes
Calmly lie in for the new day; it is behind the mountain.
It is from there the stars themselves unfold
From their translucent dirt and the last beautiful word
Of home is heard, something like country tears
And watching myself grow too fast for my liking,
The stars are not ready for counting,
They’ve lost that allure
Puffballs glow on the hill, lost souls on the grazing lands
Finding, at once, where the winds of change will take them
Everywhere, nowhere, freed and sobbing and mocking the
Birds and the flowers all praising themselves natural,
Taking my lungs’ air to the milky distance
As it starts to run and on and so on…

I’ve had small rains beat on my glasses before
And they have been worse, from the inside, and quieter
And much less poetic;
At least, there is wind to lick me dry here
At least, there are petals fat with sweet water
At least, there are stars on the corners of my eyes
At least, it rains outside me now.
If it floods in on the pavement,
And my glasses fog up when I go back in,
At least the soothing patter was wanting me,
And didn’t care if I spoke or not.
I chose to remain quiet and let storms pass
When they’ve formed high above these
Mixing, curious hands because all that keeps me dry
I’ve left inside of wooden clocks
Around the mossy roof of fallen beams
The welling pool where stupid ducks land
Does nothing for thirst, but divines the oils
A laxness of my limbs and skin glisters like a monitor
No longer need to be told to go anywhere,
I see great whales of rains bold against the surface
Draining in a vortex a pierced reminder
I’ve washed my hands too much, an urge to break mountains
To level ocean floors, for love, for pity, for awe—
All taught and told with a whole dry face.
There is no hero but the hero of undoing
And I’ve not learned enough of comfort
Between the walls that crush moment after moment
And all I can call home, is a kind of dance in the rain
Adrift from the music and all on my own.

The fatter rains are beneath the canopy, but deafened
Come the flowers whom I’d sing mournful songs,
Our latter-day hymns of Benjamin Gibberd
So, I say to them all as they to the earth, twinges of falsehood
In loved embraces to the earth they bind themselves
(But the quiet soothes of incurable ills).
Their voices become intolerable candors of intolerable people
That echo between the ash and locust who seem to melt darker.

This empty way comes in sudden inspiration, a heart
Ready to fill with blood again, to beat love and passion
Into nature’s core and I stand in its middle, crushed
By endless gallons of living things; but, I need not surprise
Or overwork myself since the airs taken for granted
That I put on or breath, settle in my lungs
Pressing heavy with every love that could have been
Or every natal anxiety come to plume.

As flies, I am not ready to make vines spring or reek up the woods
And my feet take the flight, take the prayer—I’ve only ever
Prayed to myself, anyway—this tilled earth of my hand,
What will come of me someday, grows out moss
In fibres of a self-conceit remaining in sorrow and censure
Youth and in pleasure, run until my foot gives way in the mud.

I lay sinking at the rude audience of tongues and tangles
And the open world, far too distant to really hear the speeches
They’ve heard far too many times. Perhaps I’ve saddened them
They do not respond to the resigned gurgle of the mud
But, there are tears in the woods, too marked up like pistils
Of much-quitted innocence given no reason to act
No comfort are they, nor am I to them
The only true comfort now, is the weight of the world
And the wind on my back.

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of Kings.”

The smell of fresh grasses lefts stifled underfoot,
A thousand tiny voices, wheaten, bug, or no,
Can call up to the elderly trees, whose white palms
Gave surrender only moments ago to this wandering eye.
To think, I am but that hole of many in a chain
Of lattices made only by their breakage,
For I relinquish myself to the spirit or biology
Two gods my life’s work has been to destroy.

The sun comes through that shattered mat of life
A fallen crest, defining the morose bedding of
Victim and trap, so that I may hear it speaking;
Strung up and dragging on its gaunt, breathless rot
It claims a stupid animal lived in this body once,
Relinquished itself by flight to the unwavering, silky
Thread of beautiful frailness, or motionless spectra,
Thus, it deserves to lose what it did not want
Since it did not flee life, it did not flee death.

I wanted to study it more, enchanted by the hollowness
Until water came onto my brow, fell onto my passive lips
Uttering, till then, a prayer to fly from here,
Till my eyes color over and I’ve finally escaped.
But, this motif, I see, is overplayed, too trite
For secular gods who prefer the wiles of game
We, the peak of human life, I the most sufferable of them
I, the most thirsting of my image, tend to consume.
If it were boredom, then plagues would sweep hot winds
Everywhere; thus, it is not, it is the constant reminder,
We are but nothing, but flesh to die, unwitting flies
To the spider’s web.

I may tend to the soil.

At 21, growing flowers with my cries for help
Feels criminal, ridiculous. Those ******* children,
On their mute petals flourish jealously
In more lush and verbal company,
But their speak fades out as color and as light
The last of the sounds is celebration and surprise.

Of course, I am tied to this soil, watching waves
And waves of new life rise in clouds of pollen,
Migrating and impatient; New things seem to form,
Divisions where there is only space barring austere tongues
Their desired juices, but I command Myself, abstain,
And keep the teeth and silence like fences
Made of mockery, ridicule, and other forms of self-control.

And yet, the time of false gods effervesces in a comforting dream
When I feign sleep, vines creeping up while I regret their invitation
Standing amongst them, beautifully crafted shapes, lacking color.
I admonish quietly, I suggest furtively, I command passively
And amongst plenty of others, I am one open eye, a slit for lamentations
And they are the doomed recanters of permanence, forever happy
Forever in death, there is no time to wither.

Everybody sits in quiet contemplation
Breathing like they want no one else there
If they were a thousand tiny films
Their songs are syncopations.

Long before the scene fades out
You left the cinema, you gave no credit
To roll, nor any role to set it as you said
With that unironic smile,
It wouldn’t matter if you were dead.

You said, you’d rather be unkind
Than to say what’s on your mind
Sizing up the mountain in the room
With that cord wound up
And that knife in your mouth
I know I said I wouldn’t call you out

On it, but you’re a thief
So don’t steal, I can see it in your eyes
You’re a pro
At moving right between lines.

So where was I in your big production?
Just the money shot in all seduction?
Thumbs down and out moving out
We’re all our worst critic, but don’t walk out on the show
I’m unconvinced; this is first of many episodes

Take a good hard look at the million frames
Think of all the things you cast in my name
But in the dream of mine, timeless in birth
It would break your heart like up there in the scene
If you could bear to see it up on screen:
The script isn’t how it was meant to be.

Because he dove feet-first in a dustdevil
The ground beneath him began to give way
Those bigger whirlwinds made their presence known
As names in plastic bags and things cast off, away
Slipped out and through his palms, his own
Voice escaped his teeth, said it would hurt coming down.

She envied the bird who struggled in the wind
And turned herself into a whisp of smoke,
That spun vortical inside his lungs
Somehow, he felt overwhelmed and her
Breath shaped the clay soul they shared;
Something to be hurt, something to be spared.

Not to break apart, they took up their arms
And their peace, and their dream of circles
Over nothing felt complete, so they
Could ask if they would dance or whenever
They would fall but this moment was helpless
To answer, if there was one at all.

A pick-up case sits in the dirt, a face like muddy children, hence,
All it needs is a pick-me-up; I’m sure you’ve been around and out

Have a cup of coffee and tell me of the times, mutter out and dispense
Of those all miseries; there’s another watching clouds break about

And solitude unmake itself. But I leave it with twigs, quiet and devout
Because this old-soul dispels of clarity without youth or commonsense.

Even if I could, neither of us could say what rises Easter morning
Or to what sun gods, of praise, are most deserving. But, just this one time

Dewy sunlight parched the bold-faced shadows came without much warning,
On warm breezes at our necks was something akin a wish of mine.

We know not where we are and we do not wish to leave behind
This time to count our blessings in the contrails in the sky

For the shoring up of bleak tomorrows can’t demystify a trance
We glimpse and fall to wobbly knees might stay on the off chance.

These things belong on a shelf
Like a bottle of tears that looks like a stuffed animal
And a pillow case that became a great transport of rage,
Amidst the dust and clutter
Runs my subconscious animal seeking blood, meat,
Retribution and the slightest gain
Through the wires of the human body
Cut and casually rearranged.

These things are purposed
As notches in a Grecian urn
Cold reminders of a worthwhile mistake
Taken astride and antiqued
For me, for you, betokened at my expense
Because I need to eat, occasionally oddly,
And when the stomach can’t trust the hands
Your clothing stays close to your body.

These things are like dresses on a library,
Dressing the dirt underneath
As life preservers full of water, full of wine
But these are situational traumas
And never lacking their angel wings
Defective and cuckolding self-esteems next to me
Hold hands at the bottom of the ebb and flow
Of human misery or ecstasy,

Just maybe it’ll hurt too much this time,
As revenge for my laughing at its brothers.

At a distance, the bland earth is a photo tinged of emerald green
Selfsame cars blow through. Playing in the margins
Forfeits judgment and your peace to the 10,000 shades of envy.

The usual story is re-penned like some perverse guarantee
We’ll all be disappointed some day, and everyone is at large
From a distance, those scowling portraits done with shades of emerald green

Something we’ve come to need and come to hate, against what men levy
Me and what they weigh the lithe little ghost of the human heart in
It seems strange outside light of rippling 10,000 shades of envy.

But where it is heard the gentle thrush say, “bereave, bereave, bereave,”
I’ll be a small voice in the coppice, singing, “breathe, breathe, still breathing”
At length, some small corners of the bland earth take on that emerald green

Thorns may drain burgundy from your hands, to leave your skin sticky sweet
Impressed in those ugly scabs like how you love yourself like sin,
The thorns just fall off like clothing in 10,000 shades of envy,

We lift pain away then, the happiness of the finally free
Hands lifted away from prayer can worship the single day in
And closely hold earth’s photo tinged of emerald green, then there’s no need
For forfeiture, I’ve my 10,000 shades of a different envy.

Expectation stands in Middlecreek’s waters, it toddles
In curious little hands, in Marylanders only up for the day,
And the snow geese hang like freed shapes of the sky;

This lake comes alive with fluttering wings,
The people around me keep their eyes close to the ground
While a new and weightless thing who walks in fickle grace
Stands in awe from every eye transfixed and terrified
Even the infant child, reborn like of us
Under what little sun 100,000 geese would allow
Through flight, into a world of charcoal.

Something happened in every eye. I don’t know what gods
Revealed themselves to us, or if we walked joy from scorn
But none of us felt human or pain only the swirl of the birds
Dancing inside one another like fire, like passion,
And all the words anyone tried to say were wrong.

Could I say my name anymore and still be right?
Could I call myself so separate when every heart there
Stuck to a single note, and every mouth struck dumb?
Could I speak beauty any longer, or had the geese
Renewed the tongue a fictive beast?
We never were what we thought we were
All but angels afraid of floating there.

For Kara--

I was an idle mind miles out at the wheel, just combustion
On a road.  The borderlands
Lose their sense of place and aim
Just skirting the middle space with no face or claim to
Dauphin, Lebanon, or Lancaster.
I’ve given my love to any of the three
One is in memories and
One is in late, and
One is where I graciously keep moored
The threads of my rebirth.

These signs are riddled in bullet holes, their figures
Come to semblance of entangles, brilliant in brunette
And a gaze, reluctant ever to be caught,
I wouldn’t wish to go back
If she could be remade from bones, copse, and sunlight
Through auric clouds of mayflies.

But, the illusion scatters, and in its lack,
I do find her, much more real than ever
She is what keeps me settled in the several fawning hours
And though weak from sleep she’s the very victory of a single breathe
I start my day believing in, that she’s a spirit,
There’s this life of hers inside the countryside
Like winds who speak in sweetened tones, mild
In mockery and bewilderment, the very grip of control
Has her fingers playing palmistry, pretending magic
Distorting the sad matter of earth, her very being is a song
That to lose or to grieve my lonely way
I, to Mt. Hope, find clear direction back.

Fall in love with Lancaster girls and they can break your heart
They'll have you already like rolling hills and city lights,
And she is the entire scene commingling
Where it ought, that summer aura of hers
Is a blessing just so hard to bear,
For stories are not so wearing on me, they are easier to believe.
I no longer need to pretend
That airplanes are shooting stars
When there’s no need for wishing to a home
Where the heart is anymore; there is the
Hand that leads me everywhere,
Back to the miles of shimmering land
Where one hears always sighs of content
And rests easy in disbelief.

Icy tangs are all the early morning, budding its flower
The young mother born into the sonata of her own being
That seems so foreign to thick sheltered blood,
My adult notch in this Exquisite Rotation.

Humid skies are as spy glasses to the truth
So says the colossus with our sun for an eye;
She steps out of the illusion beautifully blue
Robed in silks of celestial gold;
The skin hangs taught over the most beautiful
Pair of collarbones you’ve ever seen
The pass of your previous life comes in sublime waves
Of crashing aether and all the souls flee with irreclaimable mirth
Before popping in the atmosphere like spit and wishes
And everyday is the day of rest, a pondering
Of avant-gardens where a savior once walked.
He and his church left the path of the geese
For, he hears not, the pass of prayer on their lips.
But, I do not blame them: their mouths are full
With the sky’s drawstrings, reinvigorated from their disuse,
They’ve no time for the good word.
My family of geese fly for the astral bodies’ abode above
Where the casual speak of poets, philosophers can be hears
Talking about their *** lives, talking about themselves
No longer galvanized by their own recreations.

And as I go to place this thing in the place of pain
Warm rushes in the shifting life-force, the green of
Exuberant joy hits our hydrophobic throats
And we exhale, watching it roll back as the geese fly overhead
With no mind or reason why.

Give me another sweetwater afternoon
That tastes of onion grass and birth
And doesn’t care where you take a leak,
Give me the safe and warm provincial air
Coming from the west like a beggar
on a box car,
Give me the humidity that blots out the June-day sun
While we think ***** thoughts
On my couch,
Give me the opportunity to exchange blows with Johnny Rebel up the street
And his grandday’s probably rolling
In his grave,
Give me the hicks I rolled with for laughs before they married too early
So they can ride around on bikes with me
Like we did when the world was ours,
Give me a couple more days in the acrid Juniata
So I can dive in its sloppy green body
With reckless abandon,
Give me fishhooks in my heel
So I can pull them from my nakedness
And get Amish-made whoopee pies after the tears stop,
Give me moss covered roofs and tons of **** in the backyard
And the idle lap of water beneath the trout-boat’s belly
While I tell myself I’m not a redneck to my sunburned chest and my open flannel.

Show me what you can’t tell
From all your eavesdropping nights
The languid-age’s usher is itself
An innocent pusher of wares and waters
Like a dog-eared page, always there but
In the foggy memory of past chapters,
A silent stranger to the binding
Actors in world of 10,000 faces each of sound
And hailing of an old friend, and exits stage left:
I give you Seasons change:
Bitter chills, coming and leaving less, made her sandals
Turn into sneakers, then to boots, all one size larger than before.
I give you Divorce:
They laid prostrate in bed staring earnestly
At an open window on wither side of the room.
I give you Poverty:
The boy ran through the convenience store aisle like
It was the garden of Eden and his mother’s $6.26 in change
Made him hear the voice of God.
I give you I am drunk:
Hey, babe. What are you up to? It’s been like three days since…well
I think I miss you and you are so ****.
I give you I am envied:
All the glitter of pins came through the little slits of her eyes
And that mouth could press its own diamonds.

You’re swimming, okay,
And the Bible suddenly opens up.
Not many people are faced with this,
Except you: you’re an exception.

How do you take it?

Barely, would the sublime horror of communion pass on your lips
Once the ocean take its Leviathan form, and it opens its mouth to speak.
Its oratory becomes very clear in the maelstroms of countless gallons
Rushing blue cannibalizes itself before you; you have no time to think of death
When the salt’s burning your eyes and you’ve finally figured
How useful a gyroscope can be.

Too soon, three darknesses will emerge from the desolate homily
Taught not to discriminate in thought or action: the backs of your eyes
Straining against the buoyancy, the restfulness of not seeing a bottom,
And the path Jonah’s bones took, the disbeliever.

Mostly, you’ll want to congratulate yourself like a legend,
You wonderful *******, when you come in crashing on the waves.

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.

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.

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.

That sound, like vengeance, bitter and whining!
The unseen terrors ‘midst an unstirring throng
Come weaving between my fingers, books, ears.
Why, oh, why does it target me?
A bee, a stinging assumption of the most
Prevailing type, a thing—if ever there was—
Most hated by the modern man:
A loafer inspiring fear, inspiring action
But to act would draw the cool judgment
Of my peers—a ****, a twitch, a sound—none move.
This distance, for it does not bother you!
No hesitation to act progressively when charity
Is abundantly “there” but the coffers deign to open
And the kitchens are dry, and the powers are artifice
To shove the matter—illusory—to the great blue wayside.
Away, away thing! Do not plunge your itinerancy
In the soft of my skin—I do not want you here,
Remove yourself from my sweet drink,
Remove yourself from my food, remove
Your presence—transparently, I don’t have to think
About you if you…just…leave!

And it did—ha! Hell spawn! Parasite! But such a lonely
Planet finds its orbit just as drifting rocks find theirs,
Even if it unaccommodating, in the outer wears,
To sylvan marches—take thy there!
And it has, poor little creature, buzzing through the miens aslare
Spacey, empty, sans (attention), but sans care.
None will bat an eye as its well-meant body,
Interpellated annoyance, genetic condemnation,
Vermilion-paints on the walls of Hell,
Floats, broken, between uncaring faces, looking for
That thing called home, arms warm from its
Present-roam—uncared for Other on lithe little wings
Glass beats at the speed of sound, beat heard
Against the sky’s blue scrim, glass rippling, incensed
So quick, movement becomes oneness and still.
Who could not love you when you’re world’s ignominy?
These ******* are but foul, they can not love you
Steeled by the constant repressive ire
For that which is so homeless—what is spurned in steely pines
And flown away, far, far from the mind,
Ceases to be in the cosmos free, trapped by hate
And invisibility, objectively all, subjectively none.

Other in the rustic scene, being of not-here, being of dream
You may have all I can give, so long I don’t have to see you live

The charities are open,
The coffers are full,
The kitchens abounding
But the food is dull.

Approach me, my hand unfurls—yes, take the flow’r, this my pearl
But, ha, you’re gone—one less woe—ease, mine to know.

Itinerant, you
Yellow now flit to despise.
Some charity. Go!

All I want
Is my heroine
That I see vicariously
In the arms of a coincidence
And elected poems to speak for me.
I Want to hope to god
Of whom I cannot believe
Because my teenage mouth
Shaped by adultery
Has made a vile construct.
My love becomes a useless thing
A sentiment without action
A stray paper with blood peppered bout.
I’ve made my service
I felt the grandiose emotion
The holy bliss of a teenage kiss
That felt of everything.
It is gone.
I, left with this contradiction,
Am left with nothing but jealous sentiment
Of the more deserving
And the louder-mouthed end,
A questioned answer
That love, love, love is gone
Is becoming, that seeing
Across a nothingness
I held so much significance for
That—****, I felt so a heart-pulse
—is gone.
What I felt is an illusion
And destined to fall to the wayside
As all in this absurdity.

This is my American Spirit
Though I am loathe, but deserved to hear it
This is my generation in a long, sour drag:
Bohemes and hipsters, the self-important type
Self-serving directness with subtle insouciance
Self-righteous without e’er scents of conviction
Qualities, to all, vogue slimming befit
This, this is my American Spirit.

I’ll be the equalizer in a furtive game of chess
And acquaintance, its partner, arbitrating
I’ll wear the habit of means and humility
An ashen cherry, flicked, waiting to be
The pyrrhic finite ember and pastiche memory
Escape is apparent in discontinuity, my
Means to ravel a courser bond in someone,
As only a blush reminder only when they all clear it
Yes, this is my, my American Spirit.

We’ll have a game of butting desires
‘Tween all those appetites and some self-respect
Only, I know, to lose out in the end.
Is there a place for dignity to prevail
Or charm in an attempt likely to fail?
Can there be eyes open, minds or thought
To gentle pride its combatant ‘gainst
Unconscious abuses: yea or not?
But I will know irony as means to an end
Turned cheek from machination
That I can do, I can pretend
When the veil may be lifted—that I fear it
This, this is my American Spirit.

Of course I enable, for the cynosure, the dissonances
Supplant for fraternity fraternal-ligature
Too obvious is resolve ‘neath shaw of fleeting smoke
My own wants impeded, kept at a distance.
For, oh, Fortune! How you have written
Some conscience to mend it to others kept calm
A charity in practice as this cigarette is long
While vice, in all aspects, is the most correct wrong
But hummed out in truth as a fascist, he ought
I’ll turn to a tonic of strength to delude
That pretense and pride the conscience denude.
In some be it strong in others enthralled
Whilst ******* our prayer beads of looking-glass selves
Quietly burning the vestigial gods
That brought us a new light or perspective on things
And though we are loathe, we despise to hear it,
This, this is our American Spirit.