They say that you are the lung of the world
An umbrella for the street light.
I know you can, and this I trust
Turn my bad habit into something of use
Unlike dear reflection, contemplation under
The stars.

At the concourse of many lives,
How much spite you must have caught,
I ‘hale a generation’s lot
Could I ask cleanliness that follows me
Into silence? Surely in the summer of its
Passionate body—
Surer towards its autumn.

“Love: an emotion, one that, so low as to bar
From fair desire—self-righteous and self-serving
Excuse, a pretense, lyric, will not inspire.”
I detest to hear him speak—
Adulterer, why, pray tell, do you prey upon the weak?
“Simple in answer, as simple in method. No heart
Rich needs to beat for “that” emotion obsoletes.
Adults, mature, do not even think the distinction
That is kid’s table morality, what mommy
Only says after a few drinks, winking, your father
In his eyes—just where you have come, in fact—
You needn’t think mommy and daddy stayed together
After long spats, strife, and frustration for their waves
Struck the same height or the moon hits mom just right.
It is not the eternal enthrallment of Eros that keeps them in motion
Dear, friend—it is “that” emotion. In bed, hearts
Are inverted and split down the middle
The negative just drowns away in chemicals.
But how bad we’d feel, (no?) if that, the long and short?
Machinate the “thing” justify “that” feeling
Ennobling, beatifying, kindling for sonnets and odes
Fashioning morality and aesthetics onto sweating
Thrusting beasts, one on one in their dance of love.
A harlequin of truth, my friend! When it is found
In contraception, safeguarding our natural predilection.
Ha! Oh, fools! Why trouble with the rituals
When, really, ****** collocations concern capricious
Chronologies and covetous craving for **** and ****.
How ******! How crude! But, oh, but oh how true; think:
Admit the urge has primacy, the “L” emerges and
Lies emitted: of connection, intelligence, intersubjectivity.
Given its stage of farce and face, our sieves are at
Ageful capacity and then needs a bargain, more;
The office of “thing” goes unoccupied, its twin
Will gladly keep it clean and orderly, act
As it did: gentle and cordially.”
Blast it! Such ways in truth and walk, for
Repetition in faith of life
Pegs my myths with all their strife,
Strife and succor irony.

Patchwork sky beyond the reach
—They breach the alley way
Swimming swathes amidst the blue
—Flash the knives and young curses
Lost for incongruity
—Mere kids, mere savagery
All, now, is coated silver
—Empty packets hunger
We move on toward our night
—Shame young beasts grow old, too.

Pursue anxieties through the arches
Grand clothes, in all, proscenium
Marks the flesh of fiction of which
We wear in pride and tears, breaking
At whimsy the sacred real. Born in
That repetition, the rebel who rips
With rage and striking tongue solidity
All to null. We hold the soul of the earth
In balance just as we know every second
And intense authority, conscious of the body
To mold the putty of your lives.
Absurd boheme! But this magician
This contradiction with no delusion of self
As close as any man may get therefore
To perfection in our nihil.
Running, running all alongside
The misted face of high Olympus
And greatly gathering elements
And crafting, as any god to waltz
In history and awe, Absolute from
Absolute None.
Meet us when, meet us when
All the words like leaves do die
We’ll leave you with the seed of it
From drama comes drama
To drama it will go.

There is something, a more perfect flame
Born of the cold of its self-destructive Same
As all fire in every iteration.
Why does it consume, a being therefrom
Ash, budding in envy and infantile,
Itself? Where shall it return? Tragedies
In waves and yet I’m so affixed
To those weeping, weeping lost
Amidst themselves, wanting completeness
Or one leaf to survive them
Through the Spring. Here, amidst
The tragedies, red-eyed, disheveled
And hoping for rebirth.
I will stand here, bury it in earth.

Pretend pretend-pine at a ponytail
And feel this kicking heart
Stronger than the last
Stranger to sit in view of class.
Ah! Comfort in obscurity
Nestled in the corner, darked
but to glass and passing time.
In there, my head, the songs begin
Of lips of Siren, no fear of wrong
I’ll stay righted to and from
Capreae, and meet the mind and face
Of elegance not reflected in the water.
If this lens be infinite
The aethers usher out a sigh
Second only in my own.
But cursed coldness and mock clairvoyance
Had lit a blonde in my vanity
And cast out front in my vicinity—
Oh! Woe to shrugs of dependency!—
Somewhere blown leaves turn to seedlings
As to this aspect I am kneeling,
Fair fall will turn to spring.

Lashes emerge from one fair ear
Casting her gaze, perhaps back here—
A cough and noise what could it be
What disturbance is at of me?
Oh, now I feel the dreaded “L”
Whatever that could mean
Which only its binate twin could quell—
Two gentle abysses pass in their cursory
And all conflagrated, two passions at ends!
Now begins the heavy labor of siding
In both and achieving neither.

Sayest timshel from leaf and vine
You keep yours and I’ll keep mine

I vow not to be a shoulder to cry on
A balm to that Sartrean dis-ease

At which even he would shake his head.
Can you choose when things are weighted

By our stones a lapis and gold?
Of truncations of freedom to you

Even seem old? You, you step back
From the depths, from your behest

For know you are learned, deserved, and
White, your struggles aren’t so lead

Lament, can I, at no progress
Being the same in thought, though

Practice, marked indifference. We are
Not free, nor are we doomed

Rail against thyself and bear
And bite your teeth at the cord.

A coffee shop afternoon can say it looms significant
In the steamer’s sweet humidity
And the idle legs pace for more
I hear the whispers of world-changers and gossip mix
Local color of a quiet little town.

Sit humble and lean, a fixture ‘till showtime
And ask lines around just we’ve they’ve been
And who they’ve seen.

There’s a poetry in the patron, come
My gaze permits and intervenes
Its narrative and scheme, in lover’s hand enweaved.

Graphite plays its frustrate part the writer
Seated far, far in a blissful nadir
Bristles in his pony tail like drawers end to no avail.

Empty seats from me across; I sigh not, nor count it loss
But the drop of liquor and memory bits
Pieced together, but still a myth.

I question to the coffee light just why and what
Holds violence behind a wall of height?
Exactly how can he show his face around here?

Contrition is stretching unapologetically
For does it, too, know my fantasy
Or that I am vague to its reality?

Act or no, this marked giant infantile,
Acts on this, on me, my quintessence
As it's years from adolescence

A sigh, a sigh—my trick to think it good enough—
Peppered to my private ones an audience of extremes
Mirror use,

But if I speak would they care to know?
Hot coffee burns at it goes down
Have I faced a punishment fit yet, now?

Tight-lipped utterances and across town
They should feel the coals alight, powerful.
My better sense—my heart now, too—

Tell me this is not , nor ever true
Forgive me please if I have a few
Forgive me no, never, oh!

Feel fate on me when I come
Red-eyed and gritted teeth, meaning well
Father, forgive, though God’s not here

For more than mine, shed hath tear
Leave me to my silence, pay penance will I here
And in maddened eyes I avert

Just know in time (to that uncertain) that I
That I will rectify—invoke Holy Mary to this,
My heathen heart.

Walk me dutiful into love
Open my doorways, deliberate
Clear off the boughs
And the stars above
Walk me, dutiful, into love.

Pallor hearts of cosmic flame
Rush wax quickly, safe to say,
But, this, the tepid can warn no hand
Where Eros pierce and finger cove’
Rush me, dutiful, into love.

Yet, what ether of open mist
Can hide desire, away, steal a kiss
My, my how sane and cold in time
Do boundaries, up, the passion bind
What drives the lines, my heart it drove
Oh, walk me, reckless, into love!

Thatchen ardor incense the air
And leave me homeless, with luck threadbare
If my stars and hearts be flying doves
Away the fly or give a shove
At least I know I walked in love.
And know where I may fit.

Esoteria, this marble body wrought of burden
Of the Halcyon days, breathéd in these coarser ways
I peer rapture ‘pon the retina at what you sought
And won to capture.

I see my kind and its soul in artful craft and oil
Marvel at an author’s hand the suffuse horror
Beauty demands. How fickle the smoke of
Inspiration. My torture scratched half on leaf

Come as these came, fleeing we for it Eden
Burned and pacified this trembling hand needn’t pacify
The true desire of my own a prize for heart
‘gainst, I know the pillar lone.

So ebb and flow melancholia go, ‘twas that despair
Walked hand-in-hand down the ****** gates, no worse
For wear, that belle danseuse undone and bare
Morose lines drawn away in the scope of stare.

My future was so painted thus, these seconds were
A stronger pulse, no stranger to my wicked book
But I know difference; set I to find the charm and
Awe her radiance inspired.

Lo, it was not painting nor poetics, but the hand
Sleepy eyes, such confound this tongue and scene
Pathetic—this waylayer of my woe escaped
With the point of her toe, blind to things as I and drapes.

More joyous I couldn’t be, before aesthetics
As such let be and seeking to seek her out
As fiction demands content, I stay devout
Between pillar lone and the crashing wave of dreams

Come pouring forth. Shall I mar this angel,
Crestfallen, who, nay, suffers for awe?
Yes, I must for fear of my echo’s mate so cherished
Is fate for beauty so raw in moment’s time I’ll speak of love.

Her gaze is passed from room to wall as a spectre,
I, unseen and all, reach out, frozen as David to
Frustrate a period in done, unfinished verse
Still climbing, but to now a leveled curse.

‘T’is fitting a hand as mine would rightly ruin
No eye, nor brain, nor mouth a cage, my hex
An artist seeks Elysium so truth to coincide—
I’m vexed—as love and word step from my life
In tow, they from the page.

Perhaps even these can’t sustain the ecstacies
Ecstacies of the unlovely as I at portrait’s gaze
Stand and profane a sacred she or there,
Genius in the gallery still prey for Esoteria.

Dream a dream in leather-bound
Sheets as white as wedding gowns
Trace endless streets as riverrun
On alleys, veins back and down

Cigarette mornings, sun’s crown is passed
Onward! To destinations!
Calmly, into nothing goes on the last
And ever on so fast.

Steam does lift off the shadows cast
Off the blinding sky, perfect, pale-skin white
From my empty room Troy-maiden appeared
Verse tattooed on belly white, limbs so lithe.

Ere long, the throbbing thing, the pen
Passed and rent the soul to send
My crafted love in the sallow morn
The devils therefrom that are born

Knows not best torture  me
With outright attacks and battery
But that time and brooding are
Whips and chains—evoke his dignity
All it took to collapse his frame.

1
A dark September of the rising sun, lay it
Think on Nature’s belly, gaze to wide, and wide forget
All about the open, a shutter and a swelling,
As frost upon a filament, snapped and waving round
This cord could pluck amorous sound
Now it’s fat and dead vibration
Swallowed by Nature, her acoustics.
#2
He said I dreamt we made love on moss
Quickly his nature for it longs
Before and thence thereafter
Battered his own skull, the truncheon of those blast desires
All of their dreams, disillusioned by a rotting cream
Before he ate so gluttonously
And loath to think so freely.
#3
In the throes of such blanket miseries
He was a mountain climbing itself
Taillights seeking headlights
Middle of the line, seeking the end
Though this absolution of Dark September
Wretched and cold, has months as he miles
Towards the snow of Darkest November.

She sang starling in the dying noonish air
Whether the benches knew or no
Our finger slipped for better wear
And down we went onto the grass
We cupped the leaves so scattered there.

We both saw what was to come
Took our solace from a wint’ring sky
Tombstones flat against our backs,
And the wine in the folds of plams,
While I stopped singing
“Ya’arbernee.”

I sang nightingale and knew she would not hear
Turn up the music, baby, all sad songs
Sing the same, sing the same,
But I was looking for a love song, drowned
In the bitter verses of by-gone haunts.

I found I could only speak in epitaphs,
A cat drank water from a parchment leaf,
Of which we wrote our histories, Troys apart
But we only brought ourselves to think
On the weeds.
Turn up the music, baby, I want to sing
I want to sing starling.
Something sweet on the Reaper’s Bow
These breezes chill me, spurn us both
Twist your hair as was my oath.

She sang nightingale but to the distance
In which I buried it deep and blamed myself
I could be the good boy and kept the cards I’d dealt.
Talking loosely between tight lips
We felt the moment go in between sips.

Crept in the surgeon from the ashen winds
Peaceful, baleful autumn fire
A descent climbing ever higher.

A special case to him it seemed, starched white
His breathy steam corroborated.
The nurses rush ‘tween bed and ****, checking
Vitals of lacking that but the enigma
Curiouser and, oh, the blank screen displayed it.

There, as sight, the network of bones, all disposed
To their center, by blood and vein, all there through.

What caught the eye, a screaming white blot
In the thick of his bare cavity
A cold urn, well wrought
Had in its mouth a thousand streaming shards
Burning, pumping all the same by some miracle
That rigid effaced youth and flesh
Taking its gestalt’s place.

A nurse approach in ample fit to begin,
Crack his stern starch baritone, there he burst
Take him away; nothing is wrong
Amateur at best, irreclaimable at worst.

Humidity was his only companion
The puddle reflected the lamps, and on
A star full of skies, one after the other
A kind of sacrifice and bottled kiss blown
Some weeks before, and just as alone.

We were impossible halves, heart-beats
Stronger than the last, something pinkish
In the blood, of oxygen and hopeful chronicle
But set the things to regress, revert
I knew he was there just to get hurt.
As a kid, to him, it was a crest to overcome
A rainstorm to stand in
While the sun flooded down.

One heel was on the sidewalk
Cigarette burning out slowly
Clouds of oil, hanging above
Burned against it a charred move of love
But, it was to an open atmosphere
The thought of mind fleeing up
And body staying here
Neither, neither he divined
Of he to she to suit her
And so he sought to n’er to take it—
So staying as he is willing, willing
To move in time, possessing
A lore, a myth without labor
Or theft.

Looking up, the **** crushed and scattered out
Strangeness enwrapped him, she opened the door
Wanting to go, both feet, on without leaving the dark
Never certain, but always sure
What waited for him in the light.

This October metal seat feels a hotbed
Made of coals

Eager and empty, questions arise
Existence, absurdity, human demise
Much more to this…here
Meets the eye.

Where’bout, dear prof, would you age my words?
But stuck in loftiness is useful like birds—

That face you gave before turning away?
Let it be be finale seemed
Be it a smile—not at me.

Minutae rules the day
More use—and, yes, I’m inclined to agree
For these are the points I give, but break free
To a pity, pretty tongue fit vague for poetry
--Though it pride, I know it, that speaks
I don’t like to hear it from my own mouth—
And never for a lifespan talk.

It’s that I see in missed detail
Where, myself, this class and level do fail
But never, never can I correct it
When focusing on such impossible ****.

Lushness falls short of rigorous yarn
Robes, academic, not rightly worn
For, in the professor, his or her eyes
Children like me are still ill-learned
And grandiose—though this, I know
I know it to be
That inner me:
The pride-shielding boast.

Stepping on the pavements bits
That run into a concrete yard
A sprinkler spells its little yarn
Of countless **’rs, click-by-click

Puzzle pieces, broken brush
Make rough the plumage, dreamy air
In’t, surprised, pass others there
Since my own breath made them hush.

Autumn, were’t a talon’d hawk
Perhaps I scurry as mice do
Caught by awe and confusion, too
He dropped down, I, now free to walk

Maybe I will fetch the moon
A marble in the pocket cloud
Stays, but wavers, as wind does th’shroud
Safe, no pretense in its bloom.

Search in the forest; you’ll find me there
Letting the trees
Speak my apologies
For those I could not, would not dare.

Along, along the broken trail
A single line
No one’s but mine
Familiar silence, mem’ries glint

Though that I have cast judgment
To never speak to you again
I would still lay you in the ferns
And hold, in mine, your lovely hand

But the trees speak my apologies
Behind the timbers of my teeth.
There you stand in the cast light of ease
Eden lapping at your ankles
Winged by thrilled and lucky leaves

Blind in light, your darkest mien
‘bove where I’ve fallen, disgraced, mean
In the ‘brace of ferns between
You see me as I am
Cloud-watching and quiet,
Needing to say more
But shame, shame is defiant.

Search in the forest; I won’t be there
For you are in the ferns, the breath of tress
A concluded jawline bitten down
Wayfarer of the broken road and scene
Turning an ear from the trees
Rest I and tight lips
Trodden away as they speak my apologies.

I’ve been told it’s punishment, but from the divine?
Loosed from the bonds, all earthly ties
And what for, say, can’t I.
Lest I am the sinner, the adversary
No chains of such gall should bind me here
This concrete box where I count my breaths
Forward and back, on fingers and toes
The end of days on etches in the air.

As though it for pleasure, I-sadist returns
Congress of years from within burn
With nothing but that, no soul to confide
I will make up eyes to look—they judge!
Fictionalize mouths that speak—derision!
Bitter and arbitrary partners of mine,
And no tease of release, slamming
Through will, blood, ****, and ****
Only affixed a skin dressed in iron
I am weakly, free of that—least
Then something holds me close
My existence won’t fold in the unjust crease.

Six steps forward, six back, another six
To complete the burlesque of time’s progress
A harlequin, I am, flogging my back
Akin is the hope of some outer earth.
If nothing but pulp is beyond solip
Then fill my placid-skin with it
And disrupt my absorbing wavelength
I fear I am fiction as the words in my ear.
Glass frame of my skin, new days begin!

Even if I could share with these thoughts
Even if day would lithely walk in
Even if the force of death would invite me in
I would tumble, broken, blind by the box
Still within me
Leave n’er I, n’er I, it to me.
Am I ill, bleeding at the wishing well
No token, but holes, to bribe or to fill.

If I could just do as a man I knew of
From a source, I would doubt, skulking above
Who drilled, for escape, a hole in his head
Out from it poured, his greatest wish
In the language of the box—
I draw prophecy from the moan in the pipes
And these hands brought together in faithful decay
Trace licentious dawn and eve—a broken little slit
I know, I know of a sky—I hoped for it!
I’m strong in that face of patient nothing,
And I will win this fight!

Just, thought I, to escape a while,
Mundane light in the desk at home
On these splintered, black-tar roads
Marching, festooned in leaf and in rock
Snapping and scattering from underfoot.
My heavy breaths are this odd meter
In-out, in-out on this pavement slap
The knees are strained, down, the stream
Of rheumy little beads—lines! (I sense
Conception of a rare cadence
In which earth finds its synchrony).

‘Round the walls of rustic homes and will
To this walking gallery of the ‘ville
Ancient oaks, they lift their head and grin
To a sky beyond the storm, what with plumes
Unearthly fronds, dark with salmon painted on
Softened, its oil, burnt carnal black
That loose-end feeling holding it back.

Furrowed brow, I run with now
Sweet winds and pirouette
The dancers go amidst the leaves
Hold Hell high ‘bove white hands
Turned in deference and o,’ Arbor!
Your threshold live and saturnine
Entire eternities unfold now, silk scarf on
Goddess Eve, her halo proud
Gold embraced by Pink and now
She strides in by the choral geese
Flown to sing her godhead to sleep
Her rest had blest pain to leave me now
At those gates loud, effervescent
Shimmering, shimmering
In calm disbelief
And on
And on.

Back at the source, that in-between
Bare **** of the Fasick bridge
Magmatic pallets, on faces two
One shared tear drop, a cosmic breadth.
I saw from there the garden of stone
Lonely tombs in blamy play
Fruits sprung in those past lives.
I shared their rest for moment still
And back it goes, the nameless past
Where they exists as dreams, beside me.

Two sides, met then so diverged
I saw their peace where night emerged
Where pink embraced the dark
Went to rest on low horizons.
The world closed its lips and lids
Its eyes and loving heart
Bathed, it all, in low florescence
And lullaby of cicadas.

Line them up like candle sticks
There, in every empty frame
Quiet, aligned, they greet me home
No two ones the same.

I came in from the bitterness
They fought their way on through
Blades and pines, the wilderness
More lines, yes, they speak too.

Are they notes of senselessness
That speak of wintry boyish grief?
Clearly, when the tears are long
The lead is ever brief.

I came to cry the voiceless song
Of terrors vague, but bleak
To beat my breast in poems plain
Intended hugeness, meek.

Dusted ‘long the desk far edge
The shavings are as ****** things
The grey won’t bulk, only defend
Both placate my rememberings.

Get these bards out from my head
The depth into, foolishly repenned
Confirmed in life as substanceless
--One to the window again.

Failed pillars of the balm I sought
Look there! The thoughts I had to lame
Cut from sweet youth, dumb and aloud
Deaths all lying silent, in vain.

Those faint shades of negate-gone
Drop down from the general tear
Left to cradle th’abundant soul
In silent tongues, songs left to bear.

Standing flaccid amidst the crowd
A leaning crystal, alone in the crowd
Mourning and notes, in cream they swirl
Confessions on scraps, to thieves and to girls
Dazzling that vanilla glow,
An open window lovely substrate
I see myself, though not as they see
Dialogues seeded by the beans of genius
All percolate, till the room is black drink
A hot pulchritude of flare and space
Aesthetic papered everywhere, on each and every face
My cosmos lined with little stars,
They, too, are so far away
And charming like a child.
Two engulfing waves lead me by the hand
Both sides can’t hear content
Though too much noise, it’s too quiet
The crystal stands, itself, lost in the crowd.

Two forms sat, eye to eye
Alight by ambiguity
To you, I, you to me.
The air and lamps
Breathed like knives
As they both listened
At a distance
Some eulogy
Both known and alien
On pipes in the wall.
A debt rent in half
Empty purchases
Turned to roses
Bouqueted ‘round the dagger’s haft:
When the flowers would thirst
Weapons remain.
We knew this would happen.

Talk, shutter
Cooling babble,
Paddies ‘tween
The bugs swim, paddle
Whispered gush,
Though never hush
There cast soft in the light of ease
Sensual talk
Down the candid rock
A bridge to honor the way
Bemoaned pleasures
Nature’s fetters
Gone as a little mouse
Trickling now,
Walk on wetter
The fall may never stop
And soon all secrets are revealed
Silence—
Heads go to the leaves
Spies returning to the eaves.

1
Faerie, fey, in a windless stride
Along the verdant wood and wild
Beasts, so are, here do abide
Yet this urban life, maxims beguile.
So true, the only beast is man
Though he’s born of claw, the tooth
By birth it’s of the haft
Dagger, gun, and perfidious craft.
Apart, I see only one
Together, sparks to bring, undone
Me, for this, I dare not stand.
Such impropriety, a fellow’s creed
Rich are all in my mother tongue
Speak volumes for their egotism,
And seemingly endless greed,
Divest from it, with righteousness,
With acts they before shun.
Bah! To clean air and streams to follow
Network of the aimless vein
Blood for the vindicated!
Whilst they proceed to their empty smog
And free wills ever truncated
Marching headlong and abreast
To Hell they step in tow.
Never mind those evils done
My cure is in anathema, unchained
The inner man, the wild!
Autonomy, dumb, and pure!
I am the center of starry pull
I’m the individual, in me all is whole
I am the blot, the rebel, and the Wife of Lot!
A mark upon the cosmichead
My material exists, destined to rot
But, this death, it shall be free
Unlatched from this society.
No more shall these orchestras
Be condemned to prune as sighs
Now to high monastic chants
To venerate this life of mine.
Every corner of this brick and mortar
Keep us penned, like cattle adorned
In slacks and ties, agendas several miles high
This Fetish-Messiah, Banality
Makes sweet the cuds of humanity
None of this impurity can exist beneath
The canopy, foundation’s wrought of Ego’s dust
Pretense, a star, of foundry of the Heaven’s cusp.
#2
**** this, i have returned
the scwl of the citi
So litle and worthless
Huge slabs of grey metal
--failed of my conviction
i’m knowing in the sense
of Tao (dao), mute and confused
Tying to remove it
farce and utopia!
This cow is really low
Munching on—now, I know
As the faeries said
“At cross, betuta, moss”
What mean, all nonsense. All!
#3
The city was always upon my soft palms
That chaffed when I struck for a flame
The vanity hung in loose little threads
When my sleeves fell tattered, the same
It was through my teeth, my fellows did breathe
Strangers upon the tongue
I saw in the water the face of them
And heard them in my curses  
A stranger voice said “we” and “them”
Had genesis’d these verses.
It was those about me who birthed the world
As I had done for them
Momentum! Be quick! For fellow man!
As I am
As you are
The other’s cosmic order
I’ve built the structure I can deny
But with undeniable mortar.

Sweeten, let’s, a coast of dun
Therefrom which, the tides erode,
A castle to blind the mighty sun
Affront to that Poseidon, and others
On the beach.
***** the walls and battlements
Fair crystal arm the turrets
The audience of the hermit *****
Pay silent homage to the throne
Intricate are its libraries, etched
Our history inside the tomes.
Only grains of perfect stock
From which antiquity, in full credit,
Will revere the lot
And poetry of human might
Shaped and forged to kiss the day of light
Only  that may suffice.
In this endeavor, no ancients will tenet
Its salty beams but the children of the morn
For we shall build the universe
From when progenitors are born.

Before it began, we were dismayed
Our future, castle, by waves waylaid
Aspirations sink, now, from shape.
But, Gods, I curse you!
Let my destiny rise free!
Look now before you:
A stone in ocean of mediocrity!
All these that build up forts
Lack in that spirit to fight, retort
**** you, **** you, waters of my doubt
Turn false the shades of realism
Which I thought it all about
**** you, **** you sands of time
For now all that founds my dreams
Is erosion of the shoreline sand.

Wielding one balance before me:
Divine intent, no tool for an evil genius
Levied ‘gainst one jar wrought of glass,
Within fine grains of coal.
My sins may weigh to graphite
Fitting, for no blanket of Heaven
Suits my restlessness.
Cast me on parchment
Where I spell out the pain
Of never capturing truth—no human may.
Enigma, Aestheticus, vibrant, complete
Finished, or full. No, I utter to Venus
A Pygmalion word to know
All as art and beauty so well
As to paint it carnally.
Give me that which is love made manifest
On lithe little toes, walks her
Which, parsed out selectively  
Is revealed in awesome moment, eternal
Subjectivity. Either she steps from a canvas
Strides from a dream, I awaited it, organic
To come into being, to escape my grasp
And make useless poetry.

Innocence
Your story of silence
Took a shot below the belt
And other colloquialisms.
I would not have it any other way
Nothing of my origin
Flows from these fingers
Suddenly
I’d brought to inspiration
From the driving drums of music
And a $24 bottle
Never has Jackson given me so much.
Who gave you permission
But the idiots of understanding?

The hollow I am, habit, cowl of the sky, hand
Of the holy, mouth of the most high witnessed all
The bloodshed of the children He should love. A bullet
To the infidel set to flight, bore the dove. I
Don’t know what it was that inside me died, at the
Sermon in the woods, they were preaching in the dirt
It was faith in silence made the good man convert.

Bore the holy cross, they would bear the holy sword
Those defamers of His name, smoking sacred an
Offer to Adonai, the poor lamb they had lamed.
Christ wept, held his face littered by the holy man
‘Till he disappeared from vision became just an
Ordinary man, to walk in the valley of death.
I took from my shoulders the weight of debts past on.

Centeries’ share of ghosts of the ****** lived and died
Like this iconoclast and I blazed on that path,
Now penitent for everyman for all the love
That he may bring is surely shame to everything,
And to all by it abide. I shall revere no
Holy man nor the love he cast aside nor He
Who allowed the righteous to bear His name in vain.

O, be my prayer to the gods, Venus
Strong waters of Stygian grey, they swell
At my feet, whilst I stand yours, Aeneas.
Olympus saw our hearts, both in a spell
But mortal flesh grows weak in senescence  
It knew we should never be, for you are
Too perfect. I took this, such deliverance
From hopeless time, myself at your alter.
For if man were to couple with the gods
‘Haps, then earthly loves would not fade so fast
Take a gentle godhand, this man applauds
Aeneas is now a name for the past
She cries, Jove-blessed, ‘gainst my youth diurnal
Where a golden sky is ours eternal.

Swoon to a tearful night, unknown to its grief
Dialogue of peace, and those of plight
Ringing of morphology, raindrops on the roof.
Such things heard from the peasants’ seat
In the many wet heads sopping
In the sonorous waves, upright in the city clime
Untending to their beds.
At the bottom of that something
All told are destined they will find
Be pliable to the ills they’ve dealt
To carry on, to work, admonishments
Said once to justify these red romances
That in every rain storm melt
As pity through the night, forever unclasped
From shackles of their blame
Since life and ideology somehow are the same.
‘Tis destiny for abating storms
As some will rose from their thickened thorns
These nights deliver their gentle morns
All the same as hemlock grows as poison
And is best to be avoided.
How—this, I fear only rain my know—
Can we still bathe in fraternal glow
When some still heal from Death himself
Each breath that enters is quickly prayed to leave
High on seated thrones
Those mean so quick to thieving, the poor
The lazy deserve no quarter
Those dusty pockets afford not one
So steal the heart upon his sleeve.
May we help man wrought our kin and kind
By common tongue, free, as we are ought?
Since another may make my world
He is mine to protect, not throw to bytes
So ludicrous and feeding back upon themselves
For destiny can be remade
If hatred weren’t so blind.

Tiny moving parts,
A spirit of synchronicity
That I had ruminated on:
How it starts,
And they stop
Wrought of genius
And simplicity
The dawn and fall of humankind
All seated on a wrist
Swinging forward and behind
In whose fate
The hands so twist.
Dusting charcoal from glitt’ring grin
Mocking in a single prayer
Each second, loud
And growing gayer
Penitence for that second’s sin
For blank, so empty
The vessel sat
Covered, not covering,
In the grayish-black
Wasted time in unused power
The watch but looks away
Meager, sour
Persistent still
‘Till wakened by the rested hour
Where dawn illumes
The hideous sight: a failure
A void in Dis’ sweet hall
God’s hand stained in graphite
And no grace upon creation
Did any of it fall.

Deeply thrown to the maw of the earth
A gaze could own there all it’s worth
Never have extremes before been too depthless
And Transformed.
Light and darkness swallow one
As positivism is garbled and undone
Such a void of the ******, the saved
For neither have such slopes they braved
Or bedlam tamed.
Blesséd teeth of the darker cave
Lend me my voice, though starker, back
And echoed song sung,
Though lost in its ribs
Its to have in that chorus, black:
Harpish wings trickling bells and
Harmonious little sightless things
Loosed from dear Apollo’s light
Darkness scares Phoebus’ chariots
On which the fire-stallions ride.
In their flaming stead and ruthless might,
My frightful heels turned and taken flight.

I fear not the killer
I fear not the gun
I fear not the monsters
Or shapes born of settled-sun
I fear not myths or holy wrath.
No, I fear the lonesome
What solitude may bring
At loss irretrievable
Come swift on Time’s white wing
I fear not death
For that, at least, is comfort
A purchase for my cling
A little voice I can deny.
No, I fear derision and ties I’ve rent
I fear a nil my wants will bring
Long before death I’ve kent
I fear not fantasy
But nothing.

Gentle winds in the rustling leaves
Remind me of your skirt behind the silent glass
I can’t help but chuckle helplessly
The memory exploits this welcomed fault
Though my mouth would never speak it.
Injurious pasts have ossified the skin
Sentinel stone is what remains, sojourned to Ascalon
Misery in the granite *****, stoic in emotion
I drew this targe so flighty, back turned to the alter
To find my steps at the Temple Aphrodite.
I would protect those who love, those who hate
For I stood, the interstice, n’er affy to one
Neither credence on this sealed tongue.
Priests of joy, your vines they spent
In time they found those cracks so well
Bloom in lush across the hardness
Of generations’ sediment
The heat and stirring from below
Pushed to the sun and carved in my aspect
Nurtured by those sweet waters of your stride
The language imbued from the portrait of your mind
Infused with my coldness found within
And crack and crumble as they light falls low
Such debris may let love in.

The Rainbow’s charm plumed out from the shelf
Our magician enchanting—we wait.
The stillness abates past displays of sterility
Confessions of illusions, heard in deaf regard
O, can’t we but wonder the aether controlled
How does he alone know the runes and ways?
To roundly take rein of the reinless?
His knowing eyes shy away, incantations mouthed
Avert and in despair, from proud throngs
Skeptical, but feigned, in awful disbelief.
Collectively, a sharp breath drawn
We anticipated the magic belief wove in us
Awe suspended: a mystery like clouds:
The cosmic-soul, no hero afflicted by the wastrel, man.
Another time, we resolve on this
The typical coldest day in summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the worst things in life
Start with a:
A-social
A-theist
A-******.
A-bominations to be corrected, but,
And although, in the hands of a body
The blame must go
Tight-gripped and freely clasped
A smile hangs like a necklace.
For, they ask, what grows,
On what shore that glance a thirsting road
Where no artisan of wells
Lets run his craft
Burst with life?
What vines may couple, transect dead veins
Still in a bed of salt
But dead and grey shades of the true?
None,
It would seem, can carry the sweet
Of fertile seeds along the water’s edge
It is but passing as its plumpness
Withers and drops
Apart, epistle, a dogma.
This vampiric little heart takes no form
In Narcissus’ pool it does not
Glisten in the waters calm
Despite the furious mouth
And, gone, lost of all that made it whole.
I go back to the source of the
Grey valley flume
Unknown to impetus,
Cannot find its way in the endless roads
And paths in the sun-baked skin,
The wind may blow salt in my eyes though
The music of its basin fills my ears:
Waves breaking and pressing
On soft earthen lines, scrap-book memories
Faded at the edges like Polaroids
Unfold from the waves of purity
In the sand of an empty shore.
I peer idly into the glimmering stream
No red heart beating,
But a grey heart; one simply searching, pining
For a grey love to begin
And the world that I know
They belong in.

One plough amongst many runs ‘cross
An infertile campus
The threat of first frost
Following in her tow
To reap one something
From the settled bed of salt.
Combing seeds in the sod,
The anchor in her womb
Drags—soon, so soon,
The distance won’t widen, the burden will stop
Her knees will buckle in debt and chance
Will lock her where she falls
Her failure will sprout and flower.
The falling sweat flashed years before
To the juice beading in single drops
A vain nectar of her other’s field,
Biding her, come, eat of appearance;
Her crop was brown, but budding,
She left her crop to die.
Unprepared for the neglected miles
She toiled in the changing leaves
And, of course, the gilded fellow
Him, the established man
Could draw her in: with gleaming ivies
Red, tight, yellow, sweet
A wine of the eyes that sits on the vine
Families of prodigality smiles with brimming bags
Baskets pregnant in promise,
Those happy mouths full of praise and food.
For there, she followed
That procession, honest, in the borrowed garden.

I could take your hand
But then I would restrain you.
And why would I want to do that?
You’re so perfect you should be free.
I could draw hearts on your skin
But then it’d be as though you branded mine
And why would I want to do that?
You’re beautiful even without me there.
I could swim through your veins, dance in your eyes
But then I’d be trapped and invisible to you
And why would I want to do that?
You’re too special to waste from on the inside.
I could have you like in consummation,
But then we’d have ruined all that could be
And why would I want to do that?
You’re worth too much to just take and not give.
I could tell you I love you
But then you’re placed second to me
And why would I want to do that?
You’re always going to finished tied with me
I could marry you and clasp your hands in rings
But then you’d be, by statute, legally mine
And why would I want to do that?
You’re not the zoo animal destined to wilt.
Why make us apart-of when we’re grand wholes alone
Neither are we halves-of or the other’s-better
When we could be two, with lives of our own,
Standing, by divided love, beside and together.

Two-daughters succession go astride
One hunched in apathy
The other in defeat
I could have seen beauty in progeny
Before it was
Crushed
By artificial gravity
Smelling of blood-stained pittances
And a taker’s philosophy,
Their lunch-box notions
And plastic dreams
Rattled the bars on a shopping cart.
Do they, I wonder,
Feel their ease at pain? Or luxury, woe?
Though their smiling faces
Were promised, now reach
To Paradise,
I can seem them
Crushed
Beneath them, too:
Updated, upgraded, brand-spanking new
All they ever hoped to be,
Customized
Head-to-*******-toe.

You are no item to me,
But a specter who winds through the bones
Elusive, frightening
Warm and whitening in a cemetery yard
You’ve returned for a purpose
That is not my own.
My eulogy goes as thus on a stone, waiting
Conjuring a spirited hand and knowing
Earthly words cannot tempt
A soul who rejected Heaven.

Does she believe in a half-built home?
Or its hole in the ground?
I’ve taken the roam
A wide roof I claim to my own
And how much I miss the walls
The studs that creak and waver
To savor the freedom of the breeze.
Life plays on the palm fronds
Not much hope can hang on either.