I thought at once the hands
Took hold of life
But only to loosen them
Inside the pockets:
It merely seems a bit tight today.

Deep beneath a pillowed sky, there
A restful restlessness abides
Nestled in a perennial hill
Whose sentinel trees raised their hands,
White with subtle deference,
They do not usher the world flowing ‘hind,
But show me an islet high above time.
I sat there in ponderance at the stagnation of clouds
Holding on one end a gold string of a kite
My thoughts tethered to those ghosts,
Those wights, sitting amongst me, those by-gone eras
And down, on me, some vague horror weighted
To them it was the Stones that made them feel dated
I thought I could feel slippage, some loss of traction
They? They bore a whole lifetime without
Satisfaction.
The breeze smells of gossip and Jaeger on their lips;
Everything is on point: dances, romances, localist quips.
Whoever would have guessed
Memories ablur could be the most vivid?
Such, I suppose, is an art form insipid.
I had to step away from this field of time
It had overtaken, that shadow of mine
All the trees now, bow and they bend
Prostrate, like a weeping willow.
When they step out into the world,
A bath of gold in the dusk of their lives
Shall fall before their feet, denude from their shadows
To run on ahead.

There is a wound that sits behind the eye
Triad tonality, a fearsome sigh
Plucks a ****** chord
Lyric’d by the word “why?”
Acid fingers grin in lust
Anticipating another ****** into the belly
Of time gone by
Hot skin taut and merely waiting
For suicides to release their hands
In the chain their concert makes
Eternities in some hellish waste lived in only seconds.
How strong the forces are!
So steep a severing blow!
Still fresh a carrion scar, festering miles still to go
To beset the pinkest eves
This blade of regret
Within a greater narrative,
Tiny little vignettes
Armed in fashion of drunken odes
Those promises sworn to keep
Accompanied by such pathos woes
Accoutered, finally, in weep.
Brandished when it’s not so fresh:
This minor paring of my flesh
Gleaming in the summer laughs
To caterwaul my gaff, or plural if you like
The humor undercuts enormity
Or screams on shafts in biting breezes
This lived-in clime
I, this prey, displeases.
Unsheathed, the memories, in jovial acts of war
Besiege, beleaguer, the since-immured
True blood and guts long-since obscured
By friendliness, camaraderie
Intentions jester-pure
Trick suppressing-shields raised, jaundiced wills will not deflect
No blade or arrow of regret.

The very sky fell to greet a wandering shade
Only by a falling light
His form and frame were made
Calling, with his silence
A Solsticine, on whom
None could find reliance.
What of this world walked with the fog
But he, small,
In mist, walks without his giant
At the fields of Arcad’
To golden plains
A Dasein, in which nothing is flawed
Standing at media
Fit for the amused, too tall to walk
On and on, on shoulders the sun takes its leave
Its rest.
To giants the day is drudgery, when one dawn falls
And moon, I, dreading it won’t find me
My idler goes in wistful mists
On to the breaking light
Onward to the reddened night
My idler goes in wistful mists
Silent, absolutely.

Everything that melts
into that which is tone and
It’s all perfect sin.

You
Literati
I want you to know
I’m writing to you drunk
With a sober mind that thinks in its own
One that is independent
One that is great and strong-willed
To know
You are not pursuing a life of greatness
Merely of pettiness
Of worthless endeavors that requisition an
Agenda of procreation
Of Darwinism
****,
I may be drunk or beneath the tyranny of the ALMIHGTY BEZOS
But I am consistent in my beliefs
And all destroyers of
Existence
And freedom are
Bound for
Destruction.
SO KEEP FIGHTING BECAUSE
i AM A BEING BORN OF REBELLION
AND SO ARE you.

The pen may hit the page
But for what gain?
Scribbles
Were they ever
Of worth?
The greatness
Is not in the state I’m found in
Kneeling
Without a place to call room
Or home
Something to call home
Just acreage to call roam
Or place to go, a bed to sleep
A ***** too distract like a chime
******* to sleep upon and lie to
Ears to
Tell sweet nothings to because my PATRIARCHICAL ****
May desire a sweet lie
And my spirit may desire a sweet lying to.

I can’t sit here and pretend I’m seeing a person
Who’s
Not you: the genuine spell, the real self-starter,
The Devil’s in my hands
In the drag, on my forked tongue
That’s full of emotion;
Do I play with his fire? Do I dance with his devils?
I’m putting my words through Hell, darling
To get to Paradise.
A lunch-moneyed fist pulls fame towards you
I walk
With something that’s significant of
Romantica
And so important in the first draft
So raw.

…your HEART, a stump, grows,
it BREAKS, i nourish the RINGS.
See how much i LOVE…

“Travesty,” those orange words spilled across the highway lines
Came on swathes of a stilled
And perfect evening time,
‘Tween buffeting air and screaming music
It seems but a step in a cyclic progression,
Or the lines that commence
This processional of cars
That follows, to the site, trails of incense,
Tears of mourn and memoirs.
Towards the hills canvassed in reluctant ennui
Jutting in the shadows the bleached ribs and pearly jaw lines
That, at times, may have looked alive, yet now
They rest static as the dead ought to be.
I sense I’m getting close, the ***** surges its triumph
As it does the sanctuary,
My head swells with deep booming sound,
The lyric of the preacher without need to expound,
Too late as the ***** shan’t stop or abate
As I pass through churchyard admonished “Hell,
Is truth realized only too late.”
Though I am soothed by that song of my youth,
Lyric’d by many-a familiar cadence and tune
Vestiges of naïveté play on the lips
But, “Hell is truth only realized too soon.”
I wait at its back and reminisce
The coming great years were something to fight for
With life, defend,
But I now see that I spent those last seconds
Waiting for them to end,
Whilst prayers of hollow wind abound
Escaped to show something holds on, at least
Pretends,
Will remain after me, aft’ I’ve settled in the ground,
To be as a sunset and come back around.
I feel like a sun, burning in fury,
Not simply a shimmer in the vastness afar,
Or the muddy face of fetid puddle
Simply rippling like a star.
Keep driving! Don’t cease my tiny hearse!
Just now do I hear the mourners’ verse,
It sounds so golden and couldn’t get worse!
But the ***** has ceased,
The daylight, it rots
(Never mind that, I’ll charge it with haught!)
And the processional laughs as they go to their plots
Their verses fall too coward to brave
The ice and the snow that is to come, mine fall stricken
With every sense of the word ‘dumb,’
But the sun reassuring with it warmth-giving rays
Will be sure to put flowers next to our graves.

Often, in the day, the tickle begins its havoc
One where the answers my head rested on
Beget those questions anew,
Begetting more questions, their answers, too
I, with upright, beating breast, am fit to take on such a feat
To sing out fame and knowledge in the streets,
They shall know what I mean,
The truth is all and everything I mean.
Wracked by what seems a natural progression
From confident concreity to existential congestion
And subdued by chiasmatic coughing fits,
Beginning with the first, ending on the last
Confounded by the night where last may come first,
I got to bed discomforted, a few shots in me,
Knowing not what to blame: me or everything,
Who is it that makes no sense?

Staring at the dreamy ‘scape
I can see the algorithmic lynch pin
Taper off and down
Fantasies, angels spread their wings
And marvelous oceans rend
There at the bottom, or there in the sky,
Or in their middle-way
Is the delible surface with wanting cajolery
Written across it, “thou may.”

Fog billows over to company, drear,
Of the sad wide river, armadas of mud
Charged to go forward yet locked as they appear,
Where I am in constant motion, confined to constriction.
Noon is never as bleak as it is now
Growing ever darker
With bags beneath its eyes
And the shining sun a novelty
A flag of finitude the morning star flies.
Take up the banner since this land is conquered
Emblazoned in every miserable seam,
The mark of tragic mien.
And if this is my greeting into the world,
Surely it’s my way out,
Awakened and forced to the blurry line
Between the oughts and desires against
From here to dreams, then permanence
No other want plagues them, also, like this.
Then I’m in the company I can call my kin
Who shall greet me as I greet the day:
Et panem meum, et fratrem.

A nectar lingers in the midnight,
Empty is the forum for all thought akin
Confused, reflected, or bade to come in
Or to come out.
With loose time the moonlight was bought
Playing with the chatter I hear desiring me:
To write a love poem with all its proper irony.
A thing of gold, I fantasy it
Though blurred and warm as lighted wick
Midst the darkness tall, timbers thick
The lenses, its vital antecedents
Are cracked or compelled by the acts of man.
Yet, so good the tools, these fragments of
Ears, eyes, and nose,
They produce all the power behind poetry
And find all I need, like a handless compass
Forcing me to follow the moss
That warns two strangers must first meet their paths
Before they may cross.

Two frowns wait for the other to speak:
One long and melancholy,
The other expectant, so fraught and weak.
The boy looks to his dog as though to his lover:
“I wish I could give you everything you wanted;
Life only interferes.”
His mate saunters on, lays low
So he fears, in resignation,
“What is it that keeps your devotion so clear?”
She, silent, in anticipation
“I do not know,” he responded. “But it is not here.”
So the blank canvas continued to be:
His mate continued sniffling unknowingly.

Earthen roads spring alive with berm-gardens,
Thistles, and animals’ connive,
A country road the blows the dust
Off the porch, so that it’s just
Us.
When the time comes
that we arrive to claim the hills over there,
Command honey evenings
I, the colt, you, the mare
Transformed by winds, raw from the pastoral
Over-there,
It gives to us the boundless open dome
Free to graze
Free to roam
Where we shall know finally what it’s like to be home.

The homes, they spring by diving arms
Growing strong and respiring clouds
Of coaly waste
That eat the clarity of austere farms
And every life of put-upon
Denature, contorted as the victim-fawn,
Bloating with guts the hue of oil
Strewn by a semi’, in two drawn
An image that takes some getting used to.

And yet, this is only natural to be one with the aluminum blood
That runs in the veins of pale concrete to its beating heart
A healthy babe born of predation
A community called Animosity,
Where a life affirmed is a life denied
Though it be a bridge ‘cross chasms to prosperity,
Hold it close,
For they are deep and one United States wide.

The entrails rot on the city face, spelling out
“Payment,” on the pavement, the street
Maggots reeking, thriving in carrion
Smiling as they urge me, of course
Carry on,
That all will be well in time.

My beautiful mare turns from the hills
Her eyes now glow cinereal
How wretched she stands my side
Her heart now a mirror for how mine feels:
Drawing on love, the general kind.
Such life of hers
Such of mine
Betoken a passion, in its turn, an ill
Then to two ridges, shorn by pure will,
And still we congeal two passions to fill it
‘Till a fibrillating heart beats the color
Of ****.

1
It was a past heart ache, and that alone
Set fire to the stake.
On it, a thief in very subtle attire
Two mouths and dressed in smoke,
It may hide its face, inviting my derision
But in allusion and courageous gaze
I knew it was me up there.
#2
Watching and waiting as he did
Before the crime, Time
Told him what was to come;
Still he stole, in misery, the hollowness, giving affection to an excision
(And then he was a saint)
So to faint in throes of his pining ways, bringing this judge
To bitter dismay
And a biting northern frost.
#3
And now I blame him, the othered me,
Condemning with a dissonant grin,
Satisfied, silent and quick to cry
From killing chunks of flesh born out of puppy-dog kid-stuff
Deciding each time:
Enough is never enough is never enough and whine when it is true.
It’s not a thief but ghouls of absolution:
I am the thief
Exist solely as this motif
And alief
It’s the heart that loves in all its strands
Sufficed to ****** innocent, then wash it of my hands
Each time I ignore that anguish
Ushers me on.

1
Shh…the rain cooed, calming the flood that rages
Still a concern…or was
Now placed upon the wetted soil
Transfigured, blessed in holy oils scented with cinnamon.
#2
I grasp at the compass that Donne reassured,
Tragic to find it etched in notes
Of the Song of Swans:
It may commune beneath a firmament of birds
Yet, it seems divided in this steely sky—the color of wrathful swords—
I sniff: it smells of cinnamon.
#3
I am drawn by the scented bliss, anointed in general
That is, with the rest,
But somehow, cologned, it’s too sweet, too new
Now a criminal to laws of ancient Hebrew.
To the iron clouds, the necks will bend,
To turn from he who smells of
Cinnamon
That is, with the rest.
#4
Yet, they do not smell
Nor peel back its bark lest it poison the oil
As rain poisons soil,
And ignore, as they do, when rain is to come,
The oil is fragranced evil with cinnamon.
#5
And though I complain, clack to the mud
It, too, smells of cinnamon,
And so we’re the same.
#6
“****” is my cry. “**** them to their hell,”
Burn the concrete buildings, tear away social offal
That, with some entreaty, seems to plague us all! Why so much Injustice?
Who are you? A God? What makes one lump of clay
A clod, the other a home? Upon the heads of refused beings
How do you stand so tall? You can’t lest your empire fails
While the seesaw of suffering hoist up the side of wails
And smoke the vital oxygen,
Scowls, the first impression
Worried not about advancing goals but living day to day,
The things that move metabolisms, world-wide, subject to pay,
Wasting our lives not in 9-to-5s but looking
And failing to find
And toting excess and praising their holders
While blaming the others born from behind
Partitions drawn in world wars started for oil
For money, for wealth, both so glutted and glutting pride a nation wide
While its cells are tinged with cancer,
Both sides of false dichotomy claiming they have the answer, to answer the question
Of recidivism, the poor and they are to live or get along, dangling the carrot so high
It goes above their dreams, and it’s so blurry that it’s hard to tell
What exactly one pursues,
Or race, religion,
Of a woman’s place in the is to see how absurd such a question should be,
Here is a question that seems appropriate: why are differences discouraged,
Who says what is better but the powers that be
Lenses shaped for us to see only those things specifically made
To make the made untouchable,
And they do it, and will not stop, we’re left with no hope
But from where pleasure is wrought: drugs and sedatives that
Blunt the mind that worries, sober, replacing them until they’re over
But without any solution; a bandage to a bandage
Since a sober mind that cognizes problems can’t possibly solve them in the same state
Of mind.
A lust for love with no genuine conception,
*******, deflowering with cold, stony hearts
Fostered in a day and age where manipulation is more inescapable means
And less insidious art,
So broken by our broken dreams and forced to walk without contention
Compromising on who we are
No struggle to help make us strong
A simple shrug to carry on,
While the most powerful blood, the fire in our veins is given, given, given
To those we think we love,
While we sit dreaming and falling in love with love
Always coddling the scars, where the blood and sinew were streaming
Until they are closed and pink, taut and empty like a drum
Still yearning to beat the same rhythm again,
Needing to learn before synchrony may happen
And two drums may beat to the other’s tune,
Feeling some pulse that holds us feet from decay
All the warmth and butterflies
Come in a zephyr smelling of fetid, carrion meat
That makes true affection
Feel like maggots in the skin
And we leave to new horizons, akin in their process:
Where they end, where they begin.
And yet we’re so weak in every regard, being the forge of our own fortress’ petard
Sade-masochists that run, run, run away
Feeling as though we’re cast to sea, waiting for the problem to deal with itself
A shining light house on a miserable horn
Hides by our back, the shore receding out, and even in the darkness
The vastness of the sea, there’s still the light cast ‘cross the sky
With the same, though fleeting, periodicity.
And I can do nothing, least, nothing of worth
Being as I am, a whiny little white boy with middle class struggles,
Well-fed, well-cared for, and some domestic unrest
But I am minor, mediocre at best,
And have never had the muscles, the mettle, put truly to the test.
So I can only complain beneath the anthill of my worries
And all my attempts to make any change are thwarted by my failings, my comfort
My life,
Doing drugs, self-medicating because it’s the best I can come up with
Spiraling beyond uncontrollable until it is no longer
Me whose spinning down to destruction,
That was something of the past
Now, I truly have nothing to grasp
And I kick and I scream and I try and I try and I try
But look in dismay at any hope I may have for people to change, yet their conduct belies
A sense or desire to be anointed enspiced
Since the general oil has seemed to suffice, and that’s not enough, but I just want some change
Some honesty, but I can’t find it, I know not what I feel
All this angst piling up, like a chapter in the life of Holden Caulfield:
He’s my ******* idol since I pressed with all this
Stupidity with no venue but complaints
And this is doing nothing, this ******* poetry, neither solving nor affording comfort
Back to me. It is art and no one cares
It has no voice, save the face-value point
And I want meaning, and so I try to make it knowing full well
The intention is demeaning, but not in my writing
Its filthy fingers touching on everything that I’d like to achieve
Legitimately, but it’s all conditioned
It’s breakdown is imminent  
If only I knew how accept
Oils scented with cinnamon.
I wish I was different, or acted upon it, instead of just ******* in the lines
Of a sonnet,
Or that others may smell of their own fragranced oils
Then trifles, then problems may seem something
Of little toil
But, but, but, where am I to go, where do I begin?
I’ve gone in circles, where I stopped I’ll start again
And I’ll never escape because…
#7
Shh…the rain cooed, calming the flood that rages
Still a concern…or was.
In due time the sun will do as it does:
Show us what is, is soon to be what was.
The nature of me, with little consistency, is grasping for a dawn
I see it coming up
Now that I’ve smelled the breeze
Of cinnamon.

The sun, so lover-like, ran her fingers
Through the glistening leaves,
Movements soft, so full of intention
Their waxy dew, shuttered in response,
A low moan played in the breeze,
The light of sonority contrasts the electric
Disharmonies in the stormy afternoon.

Though I could feel a forest now eased
The river that runs through
Carried the blood of a plural heart
Beating with a passion akin in power, though enemy in fashion,
As its waves beat the banks
Eroding them into, eating up the aridness
As though slaking were its due, muddying the sky’s blue
From its surface, piercing the eyes from its reflection
Discouraging, this turbid froth, from worth of further inspection.

It rages and rages over rocks so violently
Picking at its slimming walls, making and claiming
Detritus along the path so that all the beauty a river is
Crashes, collides, and disfigures—a chaos growing
Bigger and bigger—the speed of its wrath
Bespeaks of its wake, blasting the earth (Watch it dissipate!)
Out of my sight it runs its due course south
Spitting the detritus that arrives
At the mouth.

Nihilism
=
≠
&
?

Velvet black plays coy in the breeze
Sashay ‘twixt those earthen palms, makes light
Dark corners of isolated trees. Flitting,
The velvet, intended candid yet so beguiles
The eyes that hide so much
And see so little
(That what they do see and don’t defile)
The ears the capture so small a sound
Only from fingers where machination’s found
And loud to the velvet that chips at the mortar,
Sighs at how incomplete is disorder, to harmonize chaos
And try as I may to dismiss, oppose,
I’m at a loss,
Locked in and froze.
Like veins in the hand and the blood therein,
Now, only now, the velvet tells my heart to begin,
Since, in solidity, my pulse was rescind’d
Now, only now, may my heart begin.
My forked tongue, it flicks, to spit thanks to the breeze
To capture the freedom of velvety ease, but then
As I look, in the highest of ken,
The velvet black shutters,
Then finally flees.

And where drops the feet, a mild scintillation
Springs in the splash of the puddle here
And there and ‘yond the lawn
Reaching for the vindication
Of gun wrappers, ‘butts, and other
Brazen trash on the damp mulch.
Yet, these rains cry down with passion
Found not but in the ***** of home
—From very far away
—And very much alone
This seed of refuse, fertility yet sown
Sprouts the vine of rebellious fruits
Sneaking serpentine to the edge of the blazing sun
Embracing the split-wood and claiming
The hedge-proper its own.
And though you can’t cry
The world does it for you
Its tears made a forest so much higher
Than I; in meadows pert
You’ll show me a locket
Trodden in dirt, I’ll show you a flower that grew in the hurt
And grows to the top, the burgeon-trees lead
From one, little piece of trash
From one refuse seed.

“Amanda,” she said, in a bold assertion
“We really are the same
Person.” Limp in the dew and
Wise like a sage, no wound cut
No blood shed, yet,
There was something this
Bandage shut,
Something yawning, gaping
But I don’t know what…
How sad! She’s crying, that Amanda,
Shrugging ‘gainst the colic rain
And almost lost in the copes-y veranda,
Weeping softly on
Those concrete flats, wearing “Red Tom’s
And” both “Dating Matts” while
I saw her fear in that moment, appalling, stalling
With soroitous heart, “and fear of falling!”
Binding them tightly: “That’s US haha!”

How many laughs does a limp spirit draw?
—(a disparaged few or none at all…)
Still, she writes, “I am so glad” (a huff annoyed
From Amanda, distant and sad, that I
Can’t tell why “you” ever “joined.”)
But this is not my place, a passerby,
To pick up trash, inane and lonely,
To cast my judgments and inquire—why?

To heal the unbroken with words unspoken
But scratched on refuse, she may
“[heart] you” but refuse you, too
The spirit of [heart] in Amanda awoken
—(But she refused it, too!)
And then be a token
Some stranger takes home.

1
And I just wanted to know, insatiable anticipation,
Just how you keep smiling
While all your teeth show
Stained with all that grief? And though,
Outside, you’re nectarine, just as the
Ducks ‘midst torrents preen and raindrops
Fall fat and unseen, outside
Abide, the open window wide, in clear mien
I see rain falling over glass, replenish, renew
And though you can’t cry,
The world does it for you,
To yourself, you utter a lie, but the world weeps here
For you
Just as I do, though, tears unseen
Separated by some barrier
Between.

Morning:
My taken place at the faucet, a peer
Staring into eyes, not sworn to me
And I was standing, looking in the mirror
Speaking as my reflection
Spoke back to me.
I was shocked when he took my hand
Starting speaking about identity
I was shocked he knew so much
More of me
Than I.
He talked about my too-long hair
Or how good I looked in green
Or how messy my morning face could be
Or whether I was feeling smart or lean.
He knew it all:
I’d go so far to say more of me than I.

Evening:
Look to the east! A sun set
—Bravo! At least consistent and THEN gone.
Me? I’ve no such liberty
I couldn’t even tell, bereft a mirror,
The thing I like to call me.
Walking the roads, lined with lights
Bustling, living,
Lined with sights
Constituting the parts of me, invisible
—Added to nothing, they’re indivisible
Closed, exposed, fall and drizzle
Without the gall keep hold
From doors and boughs
In the windows—I’m there now
And THEN I’m gone.

Night:
The stone church’s door where
The righteous moor their souls
Piety flows
In its golden veins
And I’m there no more.
Their God does hate me
Without presence in the
Pews; I’m dross
Since the saint I chose
Was Saint Me beatified
Confirmed from the sinner Laity Goss
—So I turn
To the school affording play in my words
And a tact therefore
But rejects
All but their templates in blue shoes
Who sleight my for company
Only when within them
Or drowning in *****.
—So I turn
To the wilderness
Blooming in virginal grapes
Disrobed save the skin
Unfamiliar,
Self-aware but only on a whim
And whirlwinds that blow
Ice and shrapnel and
Exile me to the country
Where not but dearth may grow
In a single season of mine
—So I turn
Too afraid of that winter
So much more the fall
And me in the mirror
Knows it all, knows it plenty
A casual drop in a casual chat
About identity
—So I turn
Back to the mirror
Back to it all
With showers and pictures in its wall
Staring into eyes, sworn not to me
Speaking as my reflection
Speaks back to me
I was not shocked he knew so much
More of me than I,
Since he strides alongside mine
And only in a certain climb
Telling me
It’s almost time, I’m almost there
But it’s not clear in which direction,
Or where.

“Take it, take it,” to an ocean I beseech
A phial of hungry glass
“To some distant beach”
Holding within it
All the air from my lungs,
Every heart beat,
Baby teeth and hair
All the domestic days in the Delaware creek
And spare
Time
Rolling in the waves, frothing jaws
Now have the empty bottle
I pause, I curse
That some child of me will
Coddle
In the ever-ceaseless body
Full and empty
As the phial, this thing of matter
Sublime in depth
But empty in purpose
Containing all life
But with heartless curses,
Instilled of placidity
But throbbing with surge
Until, it too, the phial will purge
—Had I known its fate of woe
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—I would have weathered the inevitable
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—Then, at least, there’d be something to show
( A monument! And I let it go!)

We are here
Flames of the oil burn
Red as Passion
Then Black as the midnight
Lighted with the incandescence
In some town home’s
Low light.

We’re alight, aflame
In the hearth of heart
A huge void, nebula
We stars, are apart
While different nights flicker all the same
As planets return from whence they came

Illuminated by the spice of ***
A pact, a covenant with the sun
Burning in a blackened scrim
As though in the void, nebula
Another revolution
Arching to begin

These giants flicker, the souls of my world
These stars I call my friends
To repellant forces we’re linked in defiance
In tenacity
In camaraderie
The laws of physics
Defy US!

By its dictates we can’t know when
That what begins
Must surely end…
But we burn like stars
In the midnight air
And in my scope
And in my sky
Nothing but blackness, infinity there
As long as the earth
And all its stars exist together
I know I can't know
What does not last forever.

1.
Ah, yes. I do remember—in the annuls of the setting sun
Which gazed upon us cloister’d couple
Just as then when this begun—
How lovely you looked to me
When I first stooped to take your hand:
The air was pink from rushing blossoms
Blown as though caught where waves meet sand
Out o’er the horizon’s sea
Of lapis stones and perfect lilies,
Our marble vessel stood calm afloat
As Time she ceased her constant chatter
Our love, on eternity, she thusly wrote.
2.
A promise kept where we abide
I see the spell on you ascribed
As though not a minute since then had died
Our eyes are locked
As is my reverence
Wedded in both hand and Time
Union’d there upon the hill
One constant spirit, forever ‘twine
My hand in yours,
Your eyes in mine
And all the day a vernal eve.
3.
Forever faithful, ‘till we’re parting dust
N’er a band, nor jem’s allure
Compel me from this meeting just
And we’re betrothed
As one amorous, fixed stone
You’re my bride of marble pure
I, your husband, and yours alone.
4.
The snow must fall, but never does
Nor do hands of some final hour
The face of parting averts his glower,
And no such sadness entreats us here,
You only cry the tears of rain,
In concert so do I,
Even our sentiments commune where they ought,
And strain, does not
Our open home, where the live rest peaceful:
Espoused to none but plots and vine
Widowed from both bride and Time,
Pining for that permanence, the comfort of our kind.
For they the living, asleep and buried,
Rejoice at such, our fates prolonged,
For what it is: the stuff of dreams.
From thence, ‘till now, it tarried
And, just as then, you beam.
5.
Your blankened eyes are filled with me,
Not soiled by another sight
Beneath this alter of pallid stone
All I see is placid white:
My eyes filled with thee.
Many a-year may have passed
But we’re indifferent to present, future, past
And though our company is but the dead
They can watch us
Forever, watch us wed.
6.
That august sun, such reverie
Upon it portents I could read
A neverending waxen love
Into that permanence of history wove
That could proclaim, our sentiments same,
Into pink winds, through homes of the dead
The fused seasons through which we tread
Dismissing the failings of human emotion,
Embosoming a steady climb,
Thus envisaging the statue’s notion
That Eros decreed so few would find
Love protected by  Terminus
Its constellation we cusp.
7.
That craft’d on love, transcending this
Oceans of present, future, past
Our ship it sails on maxim, not mast,
A message to all the staring world:
Only a love like ours may last.

I am the snow
In the rains of the March;
The returning flocks to an icy home
—Too bitter to advance, yet too far to return;
The million insect in the fleeing sun
—At blissful risk from a sudden burn.
I emerged (once more) from a shattered winter
My frozen core would never splinter
By grace of storms that built me up
From many unrealized sunny days
To be a summit of hearts dismayed
And from then, here, I stayed.
These warming days retract their touch
As I refuse to melt as much
As kindred of the winter, all
Who grew with me in circumstance.
Yet, this March has in me bred
(Perhaps then, too, I’m in full their kindred)
A space in me, a hole I melt
Dripping with that Spring Emotion
I forgot I ever felt.
Beautiful warms come kissing me
I fear until I’ll wither completely
And lose this body to a formless drop
Evaporating discreetly.
Tho’ the winter from which I’m born
And the ends of rejection I still bear in scorn
I can not go to a new loving Spring
Nor pray to a Winter, more snow to bring
For one only feeds frozen past miseries
The other, this essence, too quick to parch,
Will  do just the same as these
Rains of the March.

I’m not thinking of you
All the time
That’s why you’re (in) my poem again
And a fleeting memory of mine.
Nothing of pith, nor something to question:
Like a simple, transient indigestion.
Though, you were once a wound
--Another shard of glitt’ry ceramic—
Certainly, I’m sure, I’ve healed
While meditating you, the font endemic.
Rest assured, I’ve loosed the bind
Aft’ some disparaged thought
Where I hit the wayside
So I no longer think of you.
…Be certain and clear,
You, gift, once so dear
That I think not of you all the time
You that waylaid
Temper, spirit, and mind
You that effulged the soul of my words
Of romance, of fiction
And other dribble of that kind
You, at my distance, seemed a creature a divine
From, several of my works, your being derived.
In life I could not have
Nor in thought shall I play
(As though thought was of any consequence, anyway),
So, I’m happy to chime
My resistance to doting
And quitted my practices
Of  elegiac sonnets and poetic noting
And no longer think of you all the time
Nor do I lament, nor do I whine
I proclaim that this is…fine
And I assure you, so am I…

Thereupon the graveyard hill
The moonlight, the **** arrest me still
The forms that clasp my hands and will
Stood there as I stared into the dark.

Frightful, there, as I wasted merely
Watch Sol retreat, my beloved dearly
Left me to the crest of moon, so dreary
Whilst came the eve and her baleful art.

What emerged there I could not tell
Some ghastly mist wash’d ‘pon the knell
I knew I stood where haunts do dwell
And awaited my life, me, to thusly part.

In the dark of mind, of eyes
The visions growled with bitter despise
They laughed and mocked my bitter cries
Which rang in the frost’d dark.

From shifting tombs I heard a blast
And saw there distant the teeth that gnash
But stayed so far as my vision cast
And retreated from time to their glassy plots.

Left there was no hellish waste
But dazzling auroras in its place
So the earth mirror’d constellated grace
Here on ground, or aether was I not.

The sleepy moon produced a harp
And bid the winds to sing their part
To lift me from, to effulging stars
While forms spectate in intended spots.

The chiming bells and blissful psalms
Were to me some transcendent alms
And left their glitter in my eyes’ palms
Which refused the word, remained as thought.

Therein I saw my wrongs turned right
That evil in the dark is born of the light
And infernal black is at first white
That what I’ve feared was sun-taught.

I ran, then, from the graveyard hill
Whilst ‘cross the valley the dawn did spill
Crassly, the sun, the shades’ home fill
Leaving me blind just as at the start.

Set, did I, my pen to make
The beauties witnesses, tho’ too late
The ebon innocuous still to this date
I lost them, lost them as I stare into the light as tho’ the dark.

Green limb upon the ground
Mark’d for death you I’ve found,
Still, though removed from branches awry
And crashed to earth as stars from the sky,
Your berries are ripe, and leaves still green.
How do you, dear limb resistance,
Deny furor mean
And Death’s persistence?
How, there on the ****,
With no draught of sap,
Do you insist “more battering, more”?
Like the feet that trample you,
You buck the sole of cruel fate’s shoe
Where I would bear the grind,
Gritted teeth, whilst I shed a tear,
But pay no mind!
When, shorn from your grace of pure vitality
Leaves hope aloft, high as the canopy.
Is try not, then, the struggles portend
Such are the means, so banal, too, the end?
Even in the noon affair,
You envy green becomes more fair
And by six bells your might is dun
And you, alike with the settled sun,
For where was limb, there now is none.
It seems that Nature foul has, this battle, won.
But in the shades of passing night
Your rebel clarion on black is white,
And my own nihil
Walks with me still
Though at some limb’s great distance
Urging me with Death’s persistence
That I too am so green a limb
And will befall a similar fate
To wilt and fade, just as he.
Along to death, I carry this profession
Though even that, now,
Green and envious of life,
Its certainties I begin to question
And hum the mantra of the green limb strife.

Drown in sweetness, my end of days
To rest the restless
Sobriety assuage,
For when the chalice is all but full
And I have crushed,
Erotically and made dull,
The grapes beneath my palate wall.
The Rush! The Calm!
Serenity!
She cries her tears along the edge
And becks me find no other,
Since I wail when clear as glass
She bids me fill another.
And I do, for I love you so,
For every moment is calm like
Ebbing tides,
As musical as the crashing surf,
And only made better with time
Oh, my vintage Divine.
With my darling on our repast
We sup on forgetting my sober past
And with it humor abounds.
My broken heart wet with kisses
Losing count of imbibed vintages
We invite the presence of my Spirit’d friends
Make light the wrongs by night’s end.
So why think at length of misty futures,
When all I need are distilled, blush sutures
Or of a past, beyond control,
When the light of day it thusly stole?
I do not drink with infinite hers
I drink them all away.
Now, with me, I call us we
Is my vintage Divine.
We drink, we laugh,
But she departs,
I was yours and you were mine
(everything is turning and meshed with time!)
Now I’m befouled with poisonous past
And on my tongue is left a stain
Which drugs my better faculties
In the hated day,
The infinite hers,
This lack of drunken clarity.
Since sobriety proper is fruit of the vine
And all this terror in my sober mind
Can only be healed
By Spirit
By Wine,
Leave me lusting for the flight
In eua de vie: the water of life.

Pt.1
In the clouds that hang aloft
Whose very presence
Is whimsical, soft
Virginity dented, blotted
In the bluest eye,
A hand of breeze ushers on and
Whispers “good-bye.”
The hands of time
Their blithe brushstrokes
On sandy bricks
Their faults provoke,
The brushstrokes, too, there, paint the sky,
Like skirts of red ‘round trunks they lie
Like leaf, like stone
Fall affords no cure for doubt
So like the golden dust, once leaves of green
Into the wind, both spitted out
Were spurned, their haughty wails of “why”
By the hand of breeze that ushers on
With calming whispers of “good-bye.”
Pt.2
There I am, from here I sit,
In cluster leaves on far tree tips.
The hand of breeze keeps me fast
In this fray, the winter’s blast,
Despite that I have braved the cold
The buds of Spring soon, too, unfold
For the young, the leaves will fall
And never will it had been
That it, or I, was there at all.
Pt.3
Wait for me at the garden’s edge
Among the hoods of waking life
Bound n’er so tightly
As a husband to a wife
Wait for me, and still so young
Indelible silence aft’ the ring that rung
I’ll wait for you in the lasting day
Departing me, that is my pledge
Here, alone, at the garden’s edge,
‘Till wilts the corridor
Of snow-capped hedge
And the hills have capped
The fair sun’s head.
Still sweet the air, in twilit vine,
Each rippen’d petal a fortunate sign
That she, oh, she,
Will dance with me at the garden’s edge
Where we both drink of the other’s wine.
Each day, a perfumed past,
That smell of the rose twine her hair
That left us both in the garden, bare,
The only shawl a blazing star.
Worry not, my garden rose,
The sun may die, but from one,
From us two,
Many flow’rs shall dot the sky
And under their lamps, the pallor hue
I’ll give the rose, gift to me, with many stars back to you.
Pt. 4
But soft! I hear
Amidst the cries that fall anon
From the blanket midnight sky
That you’re aloft and gone from me,
From the darkness, through the vines
And gone like the seconds of passing time
With haughty ******
The hands that twist
From night to night
Which, brazen, explode the starry high
The hands that usher, chant “change, but why?”
All that hisses from my lungs
Is one long solemn, final “good-bye.”

Two stations’ negation
Clasped by ands, the
Parentheses betroth
Like wedding bands.
But faithful constants,
Anything but,
My mistress, she’s thine
And from permutations
Is thusly cut.
But embrace, do I
This incestuous reality
And all for the love of my
***** Logicality.
And that, in one sense,
Flagrant ambivalence,
And yet, in another,
I blush with kisses from
Tautological Equivalence.

Love
As it stands:
Over our heads
Enraptures the frail heart
With incipient dread.
What is to be
In a world without thee,
But a standalone,
A reflection,
Of what was and will be?
One cannot love,
As that adage goes.
Unless, first, inner peace
Quells ignorant woes
As any person happy alone
Can tell you and knows.
But the pangs of hypocrisy
From the word itself
--Excuse my incredulity—
Love springs alive
Only when L stands with O-V-E.
What’s more, Love’s a test
Aesthetic selfishness
A prolonged adventure
To feel good in this skin.
Even when we feel
Love
We do not tolerate
Thoughts of two.
See, only one “I”
In “I love you,”
I’m at the center
Of “you’re my love,”
And “you make me feel…”
The fact one could lie to the love of their life
Makes me reel.
So a multithought-gasp-is love!
And rife with paradox
Inconsistent and vitalized.
How can I be so cynical
To break apart rosy airs
And leave only a shocking nothing?
Dear friend, there’s something in
Love
Let’s break it down into its funny little parts
L’s for libido
O ******
V is for vice and
E ******.
A nice little formula
For the fawny neurotic
Take it with you and shout and play
Let it be a comfort
On St. Valentine’s Day.

Please, let us be
The bringers of Light
Under one banner
Of those befallen of night
Though the way may be blinded
Locked by our fear
Our apprehension telling us “Please, do not go”
And suffer more comfort full of past woe.
Bringers of light,
What you have will pass
And change being the only
Thing to last.
So love it, know it
And advocate change
Since the in vogue attitude
IS to keep it all the same.
Never suffice, oh,
Bringers of Light, all of you,
With things as they are.
Yes, you go, necks out for change,
Change everything, since there is
Need for change,
And change that change
So the change is changing
And every changing change changed
Is best
Don’t settle (so change!)
For what’s better than change
But change, changer, and changest.
So raise high your banner
And herald in the change!
But before we step first,
We pause for mantra
“It seems so stupid
To risk your life for a cause.”

To strangers
He’s honesty
To friends
He vaunts
Gliding with speech of bawdry
Making brand new old haunts
And she’s the trickster
Sleight of hand on herself
Making everyone her best friend
Leaving room for no one else
It’s a habit, a curse
Which sunk deep early on
A sultry cadence, with hushed lips,
Most still sing along.
And to this moment, and many thereafter,
The song is less song
Like breathing but apter
No longer putting on airs
I watch and I listen
To a gaunt anemia
Passing on my tongue
To the liars
Whom I know I’ve stung.
See how fiercely engaged
They are in their tricks
Yet condemning those abreast
As “lying *****.”
I watch like birds
They hum, the tweet
When falling from their hands
All those loose leaves
And quills at the ready
Their account of their lives
Too boring by action
Behind those marbled busts
And epochal fictions
Lies the rest of a person
Who is still languishing but
Singing along

Broken loose and freed from a tiring hand
One who, in restful dark, withheld just that,
And left me to wander
To trace forms in the dark
Where troubles and trifles and plain existence
Creep and whisper their damning allure.
How prone am I, at this fatal hour,
To marching idlely backwards through
A blackened torpor
And letting exhausted candles
The haunts that hold, illume the endless halls
That each corner and door
Some revealed appalls.
Drown their debauch which sensually fawn
Out in the words of Byron’s Don Juan
And still feel their tempts, by some form of folly,
That compel me to a world of licentious melancholy.
Looking back to my bed, growing all the number
Cursing the forces which denied me my slumber
And what I saw in rich, encroaching beryl
Reconciled the dreams bereft of me:
An air of such fancy, a more permanent scene.
A smell like the snow to the darkness betrothed
Harkened me hence to a frosted window pane
And out it I saw an occasion so mundane
But at his hour, this light, the glittering flakes effervesce,
I thought I a soul gone from this place
And sublimed to a world
Which cannot harbor, nor ever know, hate.
The sky was so pale which, blithe did it shed,
So many crystalline wonders falling from space
And resting with ease and settling right into place
At that I saw the immaculate ground
Uniform, sanctified, untrodden upon,
With such power as to ward away any notions of destiny,
And purgation of all that could darken the mood.
Each lambent flake a seed sprouted
‘till the lawn was full of snowy trees,
The boughs which bloomed like a placid freeze
Themselves wearing white and all encrusted with ice
Like holy men inept to the notion of vice,
Reached high to the Heaven,
That which I doubt,
To catch alms on their fingers and Gloria shout.
Miles off I hear permeating through the calm
Respire as I arrest,
Synchronized, with time, the lungs of the world
Until my being, minutiae, was that of the whole
And the heart of beauty, a natural heart,
Beat, my confederate,
In league with my own.
In the colors of preternature, picturesque they played
That even in my worst of lows,
My heart at that placed stayed.
The azure raiment bleached at the wakened hour
And my eyes could not help but look away
Blinded by some intense light
In darkness they reflect on the previous sight
And rapture still comes in recollection
How dull were the visions before me lain
Their memorial no substitute, all artifice and plain
Petty entreaties, my pinings for that place again
Though destruction of halcyon I durst not entertain.
Even in depression, it wiles ******
And at times is seizure upon me lengthy, despotic
I’ve something, a snapshot, a little dab of paint
Which even my horrors cannot fully taint
I’ll think back, I’ll go back to that very place
Which I did not wholly leave:
A place of pure bliss
Where I cannot grieve.

Piercing winds, fast and with malice
Whisk away, playfully, the revolutions,
The songs and smoky thoughts
Which I saw smoldering right in front of me,
I see them rising in the night
At the ceiling
In dull streetlight
Mere abstractions, soft and white,
But roar the horn
Of guilty pasts
To their image the smoke holds fast
What soured scorn and blackened mien
Reject my constant repentant whine
And I travail, until I sleep
Their jeers and anger
I choose to keep.
And worthy, still I lay in bed
To even look into a dome ahead
Finite, bleak, and hopeless that
I find only appropriate.
And so close,
I grasp its bars
And wince ghosts whip and slash
At my wrists which I hold out
And tell them “harder” ‘tween teeth gnashed.
The day light comes,
And illumes my worth
By my feet spelled out in the dirt
And just and fair, to dirt I pair
That’s why my eyes
Are fixed there
All I gaze on, vibrance to ashen waste  
Ask the smoke
The he and she, I corrupted chaste.
So my neck can take nine tails
My head is bowed in penitence
Yet, there is no flogger
But my own guilt,
My crimes, like flowers,
From proper minds wilt.
I’ll keep these eyes downcast,
Where they belong
And move without progression
For I’ve done wrong
And with the ground I stay
To payback what debts that vanish
To pay them everyday.

A sickness, the fear
And trembling on my lips
A bearing now oh, so baffling
All these maladies seem to be wearing
Still I hear,
To abate my scaring
Wind chimes chiming
And children laughing.

A man I knew once
Of nobility and pitiless prose
Forked tongue, a mind who blunted those of ferrous wits
A soul nurtured by the forest ewe
Adverting stimuli, in solemnity he sits
A flicker of passion in his throat arose
Promptly licked by that silent promise
Condemned to obscurity, like firm soil he is composed
Ardent and sullen like any cracked timber,
He remains fixed, as the dead in peaceful slumber.
All and none, brothers of the pupil akin
The zenith of event, he has already been there
Visions of splendor, grandiose pulchritude, and ruin
Of his that mine eyes seek do not they dare
Of mine his eyes have never been so cursed
Blank but fruitful what glory he has seen
Of things beyond all mortal belief is he so well versed
Encased in lye and pewter flesh,
No hands were laid upon that sconce
Preserved in ****** garment, immune to life’s thresh
Did not he ignore a man, but rather lack response?
Him lacking had no name, but the case of which him befell
I called, ‘tis true, beckoned him here
And not a nod in my direction
Yet to beseech a brook at the chine of a knell
A thoughtless benediction
But deluded I, spent drunk immersion in this life
Drowned by rushing torrents and temporal maelstrom
A reward of prolix strife
My thoughts composed of endless lies, theories
Countless deeds of fitful right and wrong
Yet he, so pure, have thought nothing like myself
No speech to taint his canvas
Nay, he’s different, of this I’m sure
He’s not diseased, he’s not impure
For it is I, of adamant ardour,
Who should seek his mindful cure.

Has one ever known
The therapy of cutting fruit?
To pare a pear
Its skin left bare
And cleaned of its coarse green suit?
Underneath
The white meat
With knife parts so easily
That, in my grief
Blade unsheathed
Slice here and here and here.
Sweet relief! The nectars pour
In the sink and on the floor,
Its ****** sheen
--The loveliest I’ve seen!—
So I cut more and more.
I’ll cut the fruit, just like I said
One can't **** what's already dead.

Death would not deign to visit me
Not with salute or fatal formality
I’ve written letters, invitations to dine
Perhaps to dance after some wine.
He has yet to entreat a call
I fear he may not come at all.
Given credit, I’m one apt to hide,
I do not tread were he abides.
Occasionally,
He responds to me
In manners and way
Peculiar for this time of day
With presage cryptic, but meaning well
That I cannot hear a personal bell
Like that of towers
When it tolls between the hours,
That his design
(this life of mine)
Will come a calm, inaudible chime
But only in my due time.
Until he comes, for him I suffer
From his disappointments I may grow tougher.
That, my friend, the worst of hells
And it seems Death, from what I tell,
Is doing his job and doing it well.

How jealous am I
At poetry?
That simple words make the lovely firm
And compact shadowy abstraction?
Every letter holds a bitter love
A fiction made with zeal,
Drawn from pinpricks, imaginings,
A fiction I made real.
Within them, sit, the cloth I weave
My heroic darling love exists
There, sobriety is leastways bearable
And pen to paper I can’t resist.
I see perfection—her complexion,
Written out in words
But she is so stolid
And doesn’t move
Her features fade when I admit,
Stale enterprise, the poem done
and the page I promptly quit.
Rife with guilt and melancholy
I’ve done impulse injustice:
Concretizing the unknowable,
Left caricatures incomplete.
Despite the sense, here, stacked before me,
The envy for this poem
Because it has a solid grasp
At the prickings of my heart.
And still, what have I
And what have he
But two-side written jealousy?
For more words that breed a love
Of which I, voracious, hunt,
More beauty, more glamour, rosy viscera,
Give poetry that fallacy,
That fallacy I want.

A glinting, like starlight
Hides deep beneath my eye
Surrounds itself, impenetrable
Never wanting to be found,
Though, in my breast it beats aloud
Beating this awful, heart-like sound
I spurn and spit and hate the sound
And bid it go away now.
Despite that voice, my searching seeks
--The cosmic heavens,
--The infinite blue,
(What deception starlight can do!)
My planted feet
And fixed gaze
Envy comets passing by:
Not to stand and wish at stars,
But to watch the earth
Pass deep beneath my eye.

Light from a prism
These petal’d flo’ers grow
Breath in weighty breaths
Versicolor whispers that quietly follow.
They step alongside you
And spring in veneration
In the alluring prints you left behind,
Like groves from every indentation.
But, it’s the same
Where her footfall goes
--Abreast the creekline
--In grassy seas,
--On the concrete
--In the seconds that pass by me.
I so want,
But one flower
To fill up, reserved for that one fair.
Still, though I grab
For my partnered hand,
Thieves on breezes steal them away
Wilt, as I pluck
Flowers from the footpath
And look ahead
To see no flowers
Wilting nor even dead.

They asked me what I saw
In the mirror of the sky
Like direction on a map
Or maybe a loving big, blue eye?
I had no heart to say
None of it
But constellations
Illumed to me that way.
What error befell me
As I ran my fingers
Through the space
In between,
Naming them all,
Every brilliant tail seen;
Every Pyxis,
Every Ara,
And the Gemini Two
Hailing to a name
Which they don’t belong to.
What a fool I am
To call the whole heavens
By one fallen star,
When they still
Spill, infinite, onto the black mirror ahead,
While I watch and wait
For them all to fall
And watch and wish
That I had never
Watched and wished on them
At all.

Tinderbox pt.1—Magic
At first,
I caught its eye
In the rolling smoke of fire
I ****** my hands
To pull it out
And speak with lighted words,
In light of brilliance,
A vital warmth,
But in the end just ashes.
And then,
The curve of silk waters
Which rushed upon and through the rocks
Wrote to me
A rich and liquid poetry
Not in bursts but subtle waves
I cupped my hands to catch its words,
But even then,
I could only hold so much
And only for so long.
               Tinderbox pt. 2—the Artist
Entranced in the world
Here and beneath the moment,
In the spaces and each letter
I saw the fire, the waves of silk
Each play in their environs,
I’d grieve
At their perfection,
Running my eyes over their hilly peaks
And dreaming mine had been there.
My worlds were ugly, incomplete
Extinguished at very moment
That the two would meet
The tinderbox was fire to my hands,
My cup was rife with holes
And there, I’d thought the artist dead
Or never even alive.
In my sleep I’d hear a voice
Like Milton, Coleridge, or Shelley
A babble arresting and forcing pity
From its infantile lucidity...
I knew this thing, but killed it.
Perhaps even now, I believe in magic
Though, to pluck rain from a furied storm
Or converse with tiny sparks
That become
Something of brilliance and solemn silk
That groves were wrought from tiny seeds
Long after mere chaos
That, from it, comes a universe
and white paper is all it needs.
What awoke me was not
That there was art
But that the words had tried to say something,
Something the heart could not speak
Nor the mind would dare to reason;
It was not as much the words that made it up
But the worlds in between them.

Take punches
And smile
The big never get small.
Like dust
Along the mountainside
Take their everything
And be not at all.
Be proud, little dust
Do not fear the all alone;
Every mountain of we
Is divisible by infinite
I.
To dream of stones
Is petrified,
But how can you move mountains
When you can’t even move yourself?
Let them have their lands
That stop along the shore
Mountains stay just where they are
But you’ve got
A million and one
Other places
That wind could take you.

A little sigh,
Departure
From this world
To astral planes,
The cutting winds stop their assault
And lift tenderly
A rolling breath.
Among the stars, it disappeared
Though long before
I beat it there.
From still feet, pocketed hands
The vivid rye enwraps my palms
Whilst I, lax feet,
Walk to fields
Of the midnight flowers.
Since the sun went to its rest
Their cosmic petals unfurled
I reached up
And pinched the seeds in my right hand
And flung them across the world.
But I could not stay,
For fear of dark
Nor force myself to leave
The upright shadows that walked at noon
Though soon gone, pushed me away.
Caught ‘tween sun and night, two worse off half-lights
Frightened to go,
Reluctant to stay.
There I sway, I take their dower
Through this precious selenian hour
In the forest
And over knells
To those fields
Of midnight flowers.
Their tiny halos of a velvet white
Augur what comes: a wanting night.
And yet their whispers,
Of dimmed succor
Show me in the yawning fields
What I came to them for:
To bathe in the pallor
That falls everywhere
And clasp my shadow’s hand
To run through fields
Past the morning hours
To lose my breath
And pluck the petals
From every single midnight flower.