A crack up the wall
And the house is broken
A cloud in the sky
And the world is grey
And my faults are many
Even if they’re bridged
Even if they’re far gone
Cracks don’t go away.
Maybe all the bad things
We millennials possess
Is a gritty reminder
Of what’s in the rest.
The human condition can’t be that strong
Perhaps Gen. Y,
Just got it all wrong,
And we’re not new victims
In this generational war
We just bear darker versions
Of our parents’ sores.
But we’re young and stupid
We just don’t get it
It’s suppression versus reality
And we’re getting all the ****.
If we were laid brick
In a nice, big wall
The bricks, true, before us
Made us nice and tall
But when we look down
We only see cracks
Big cracks in the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Put this matter with trowel and ***,
Into the dark and fertile ground,
With each hit, he loosed the soil
A once happy man thou condemned to uselessly toil  
His claws, cracked and broken shells
Jaundiced with the duty long days that did require
Lamed by grief and forced to work
Here, till the end of days, within this garden, this mire.
Deep does a ****** live here, past the clay and bedrock
Like the pride and valor and resolute spirit of the domineering ****
Or so her mien, it does beget
Or some other erroneous sentiment
That she, not he, were to bear this labor.
Within the ground, he did remember, in his spritely youth,
He planted, and thought none of, but a seed,
Into this verdant splendor, which bore that infernal ****.
And, thence, thereof came a fruit,
Of malignity infinite,
All the while it poisoned the ******’s white and water’s pure,
As its eerie little spines proceeded to take root.
Her garments poised to emulate white, instead
The ******, to him, had lost her white
Or never had white at all,
The ******, to him, had lost her white,
To him, the ****** was dead.
The fruit and seed, effulgent and pretty, to those who saw them bloom
Attractive were they so to them, irresistible to behold
That they, to him with great chagrin, did immediately consume.
“But the ******,” he cried. “The ****** has poisoned them!”
Yet they continued to eat.
“We do not believe you,” they replied, and slept ceaselessly on their feet.
One by one did they all collapse from the toxin of its juice.
The ****** watched and laughed, of caution was there no use.
Powerless and sullen, he stood, for remedy was far passed.
The ******, now regarded with delight,
Has he, poor, poor man, to tend to his blight.
The garden gone, its cleanliness perverted,
His words were ignored, and thrown wayside,
His admonition he so heatedly asserted,
The ******, her words never to be trusted
Had won over the people, whose homes she sought to entreat,
And with her rite, so treasured, so adored,
They enslaved and force him to his mire, to tend to the rag and filthy lands
Where he would remain with the garden
His words, his skin so like the sands

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.

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.1
A jaunt through halls of death’s portents
The portraits, the colors the gallr’y transcend
The ceiling, so high, a silv’ry grey
Walkways bathed in that milky ray
Patrons babble their ephem’ral talk
My strides and mind, against their walk

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.2
Stoic thoughts worn without defense
Entwined in fleshy accoutrements
And like the forest, soon to be
I’m wearing down acuity
I can’t enjoy an adverse face;
I’m simply looking for my grace

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.3
With grace on mind, my waltz in knells
My heart, I feel, it heavy swells
With that strange thing, hard-pressed for words
Fleeing, fearing like a flock of birds
I cannot mourn what never lived
My wish, in your heart is that it is

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.4
Never mind, I speak too soon
Your loveliness silent, cool as the Moon
These shadows bespeak a certain doom
Embattled me, in the past I loom
Forgive me, my sophomoric tongue
Forgive this sad song I have sung

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.5
In due time, I shall reveal
What and how I intend to steal
To repay what you stole from me
What I exposed when you spoke to me
I don’t not hope (and yet I do) that you are plighted blind
I truly hope, this awestruck boy, is weighing on your mind

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.6
Ev’ry flow’r in this great land
Could n’er be bless’d by that sweet hand
For I hope that bloom of my own
Could occupy that pale, lissome throne
I’m shut up, locked, I drone
Pure pulp to you, my abounding tome

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.7
Those sweet waters, cursed to dry
My mouth and austerity slated to die
Melting, am I, in boyish infatuation
Your cataract rising on my muddy station
My fruits of mystery, your gaze turned sour
And my exposure, to me, a dower

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.8
Despite my mantra “Be forever alone,”
That short, bobbed hair and cadence bemoaned
A stoic foresight, so brutally sought
Does shy away, that training for naught
This emotion, I fear, the superlative begets
Despite I have not even told you yet

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.9
Give me grace and stability too!
And though our meetings, infrequent and few
I’m undermined by fervency
With just the thought of you and me
I must remember to take it slow
Though through my darkness, it certainly shows

[A jaunt through halls of death’s portents] pt.10
I feel my heart is full to bursting
Yet I still feel a limitless thirsting
My eyes, my cheeks flushed and red
When I think myself inside that head
I see myself within that face,
Humbled, I share their time and place.

Epilogue
The reality is coming quickly
I’m anemic, undone, distracted and sickly
Heart cries out into the leaves
Every time that fair one leaves
Enlivened, at sudden, so make haste
Please, oh, please, grant me your grace!

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.”

“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.

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

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

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

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

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.

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

…and quite becoming, disillusionment.
Old and young children are holding their legs
At the terminal of a new life,
new…

So this is what they call anomie?
A grayness,
A blank,
All things devoid of beauty?
When the eternal arms,
Have left me to my own devices,
To toil in deaden land
To paint futile pictures?
I’m wading through waves, through fires
Surely to send a man to delirium,
And as though it never came to pass
I sip unsweetened tea.
What rips men apart,
What fetters pull him in twain,
Simply move me with sway
And don’t move me at all.
Tears rush like the flume
Admonishments thrown
And I can only sigh in frustration
At all this petty emotion.
For man fills his stage with characters,
And bleeds ink all within his works
Aspiring to his own audience, the god he is,
I simply abuse this alchemy
To bide my time till death.
Call meaning what you will,
Fill your life with love,
Fill your life with gold,
with God,
with spite,
with studies,
with yourself.
I cannot,
I do not,
I know not these simple pleasures
Perpetually I am not full,
For there exists where faith should be
A deep impartial hole
If I could be normal,
If I could be normal,
If I could love,
If I could believe,
I’d turn away from it,
And choose to stare uselessly into my faithless hole,
All things beat on, as they be,
And this conviction, be it ever so keen,
That existence and living are useless things,
I’d still see what believers still see
That being the world as beauty,
I’d only see it with a more grayish hue
(Without the pretension to know what is true!)
And see the sense it lacks to see
And commit myself to this anomie.

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.

Dear...
This haphazard poem was written solely for you
Matterless, what you came garbed in
Fever elicited, passion anew
You’ve graced me, the repetition of ‘could-have-been’
I loved the way you speak
Of knowledge and triumph
And I, bumbling and meek
Tirelessly I sought and now still seek
Your council, your court
For my amusement, for my sport
Conversing over a poisoned well
I listen in genuine
Raise my voice
Sing with my friends amongst the din
Higher on the pillar, you I hoist
Pure skin my well intentioned hands mar
Clumsily, I lean into a similar heart
To discuss life and literature, fantasies these hands take too far
How eloquent the silk you weave, which you impart
Which inveigles and entices, cajole us into the city
On pale page, the street lamps and dim moon, art
Palpitations and liquor test the pity
Of light and fire
I cannot help but explore your shapely form
And yet, without bar
Across miasma, my guide is a cute little hand
Solitude, the pulsations do doggedly solicit
I just want to be close, you grant this
Bewitched by the creamy satin of pale skin
Distantly, warmly, I gaze in those God-given sculptures
Of the richest green and azure hues, bespeak feminine
Engaged in the other’s stare, two drunken apers
The night, black as sin,
The mould of outcome of we are the shapers
And I shape regret that rises with the sun
You come back vividly and lucidly
Distant and opposite, worlds across, you from me
A nondescript ghost in the corner
Who speaks so placidly
I remember with regret
I remember with exultation
I’ve ruined our relationship
Our relationship topical felicitation
I haven’t had time to apologize
I haven’t had enough time with you
If I ever see you again
I’d mend everything
I’d discover the girl behind the name
And cleanse the projection askew.
Love, Me
Dear...                 .

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.

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.”

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.

Do you feel how the air moves
Autumn, my love?
I have a secret to confess
Autumn, my love.
I have been blue like the summer sky
Among the cordial zephyrs
Those crowds and their pleasantries
Alight everywhere
As the trees in plumage
Concealing so much as they reveal everything,
Autumn, my love.
It has been a feverous summer,
Mad Augustine march of the southern breeze
Into the remote Tuscarora contemplation
Of lascivious concealing,
Autumn, my love.
You chilled my hands, leading me up
The logging path,
Ignored my glance and kept pulling
My insecurities up to the surface
The grief and lethargy I feel
Stomping through the moving pictures
Of the concealed revealing
Soon the sky will be very clear
And your darkness passes across your face
Much sooner now,
Autumn, my love.
Why did you bring me here, to the edge?
You pause and wait for the sky the perfect
Blend of grey and decay.
You speak and the leaves fall around me
And I feel myself melting into your *****
Covered by your many hands
Curving around my body, enveloping,
With your gravity putting me on my back
And carve my every sacred cerebra
With the twists and moistness, the cool
Air scent of the sleeping earth
Of your belly
Autumn, my love,
I wish to have you always,
Autumn, my love.
Your cracked embrace swims down the ravine
Seeming to wave goodbye.
It’s in time likes these,  
Autumn, my love,
I cannot bear the thought of an equinox of passion,
Where the golden sun is soon on its way to setting
Autumn, my love.
You look out, where the sun will rise,
Your footsteps gliding over the edge
Where I cannot chase you out
The valley of your body and you giggle at the fact,
Autumn, my love.
A single leaf falls from your hand,
I wish to have you always, too
But this joy can only perch on the precipice
Of despair
Each day must flee quicker and quicker
You tell me, you’ll love me more when I am gone,
Autumn, my love.

At once reality, his matter found
Blue eyes arrested by the lighted set
Behind those ****** pieces, cyc, and sound
And heart’s threshold, at its suff’ring surfeit
A dazzling sun's ray of magenta silk
Rippled, suspend, to black cascading down
Obscured surreal faces of Love’s own ilk
Two silhouettes collude don one pink crown
In a scene effulgent, swelling refrain
Whole being exposed and seen from afars
The artifice washed bare, cleansed once again
Pretty in pink with lovely, lovely scars
One arm outstretched, clasped her aura’d waist tight
Falling like dead stars, tears bathed in pink light

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.

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.

In the middle of it all, linoleum and cleaners
I find the shelves of candles and pry off their lids
Just to find out what scents they hid.
No noise, no racket, and nothing meaner.

The balsam fir in craters of wax
A chirstmas tree hunt and sugarsnackes
Recollect times to play and relax
Late December days and skies overcast
The carrides back smelled of this.

Of the wild rose, all pink and flush
Our faces betrayed us after stealing a kiss
And stealing away hidden with a wild blush
When asked just where we were.

I’d say the black bamboo
Where the growing pains began
I remembered what I never wanted to know
Smelling her sweat on my hands.

After every cupcake and fall harvest
We felt torn in two
Amidst the parents and summer’s zest
Everything I wanted couldn’t possibly be true,

The strawberries, the honeybees
Clean linen on a quick, tense rainstorm
I fell to my knees,
Afraid that my passions would
Take on another form.

Far too wild and winterborn,
You have your sleights in sympathy
And obtain what may decorate your court
I amuse you with love: an elegy.

But, the heart is no traitor, not to any court
And says I’m no citizen of your lovely heart
I’m a smiling nomad that goes in due time
And, love, we can trade castles
Since you’re no citizen of mine.

Again, the scents linger with no flame to their wick
Closed were their lids to choke out the burn
Cool were the insides, like ash in an urn
A single spark dazzles but goes out too quick
Each smell left unfamiliar may not have you
It’s not you and me, but me and you and you and you.

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

I may tend to the soil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You say you saw the void?
Look into these eyes—
You do not see
The transparency of space
A nostalgia of regression when the
The mountains seemed so much smaller in your youth—
Not in these eyes.
You don’t see the void, but the future,
Not blackness, but the future,
Not the future, but the past,
Like all of us clairvoyants.
You close your eyes to see the world
Through clean mantras
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Looking back as their gaze looks forward
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Sounding the woolen past
And eerie comfort of rest
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Reading your own future
While reading others’
Like all of us clairvoyants.
There is no such thing as darkness anymore,
A truth you know well since
All truths are certainly true and false.
Wait for the light through the window
To scan the floor;
Every person is a lighthouse
Searching wildly in the dark
And in storms, ships will land
With or without permission
And you’ll laugh alongside them
With or without provisions.
Show me your tricks,
Clairvoyant
I have already lived in the future
And am not fooled easily.

There is an old adage
About the silver lining of clouds
As though compassion, camaraderie
Bless me
Like seraphic light and sound
But the light of day
Is destined to perish
A boyish heart, naïveté
Adjudged to inurn a body I can’t save
There, at the crest of a mount
There, at the foot of a grave
Mouth, icy
Screams, like vapor
We stood on the mount
The light beginning to taper
Such eminence we began to doubt
The skies wept for what bond withered
Empty sentiments
We lay thither
And wrote the epitaph aloud
On our own masonry
And there the clouds came
Light refused to shine
Hope refused to grow
We sang a song to commemorate
We sang the empty refrain
I laid your body in the hole
And then you did the same
We sought the sun, like fools
In abandoned, loveless houses
Behind the mortar of schools
In the gap which separates
We ran
Towards the wan and sallow horizon
To escape the clouds
Which swallow the dawn.
Yet, it runs on ahead
Buried beneath oily coffins
In which I’m just a nail
A body and a whisper.
Mother Sky weeps
As I rest, eternally conscious
Condemned to witness a cyclical end
And let my blood, precious
Its exeunt, you contend
We are impervious
And towards the dawn, herald our song
Of triumph, love, camaraderie
We’ll galvanize the heavens, our victory so loud
But all that is before me
Is abject, loathsome clouds.

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.

Dawn, o Dawn
Sunlight that spills over a distant hill
Teasing the shadows of wheat and knell
Filling the cracks with a soulful lit
Expose the face, the shining face
The earth that shies from night
Expose the blindness of the earth
Just as blind in the light.
The fury that melts the dew away
Casts me long away from me
I stood outside, the weeping fields
Seeking the escape I need.
Futility, oh misery
It pulled me back, the seed
And forced embrace, to love the day
Despite spurn, implore, or plead.
The coming day, I hate the man
No friend of mine is he
Every day, oh, Dawn, oh Dawn
A disappointment to me.
Ev’ry step of Apollo’s path
Is paved with bitter tears
Each minute, forced to swallow
To see my failure’s leers
Each time the day begins anew
I’m forced into a darker world
One where pieces of the previous day
Are halved, split into
Shreds and shreds Oh, dear, oh, dear
You’d think spirit’d be all but dead
But what kills him more is not his thought
But what my eyes continue to see
When those eyes were drawn to me
The sun shows never was
It existed in the dark
Obscures like barley’s shadow does
And if, of course, it’s fantasy
A book intent with end
I’ll rip and claw the dawn away
And fiction I’ll defend
For if you’ll never grace my field
And reap the fruits that grow
I’ll just raze them, sky and all
The passion the earth will know.
A fictitious world, much more surreal
I love my own creation
The sunlight unveils the bitter truth
They are not food, but cremation.
If I could stop the coming dawn
If even for a moment
Darkness would bathe the far corners
Wasted lives atone it.
But that is bunk, the dawn knows that
Reality is taken in full
Who ever knew a crisp fall morn
Could be so utterly cruel?
Laying here, the sun moves on
Soon we’ll both be dead
To face the face, my misery
Confines me to this bed.

It seems so far away
My youth preserved that precious little thread
Convinced a price I’d never pay
Convinced I’d never be dead
I thought my skin iron armor
A shield to all the shifting forces
The forces that nature threw at me
Until I saw life at its sources
And for lasting life, was my loudest plea
Never before
Have I seen so visceral a scene
Until I witnessed life escape, stripped to its very core
And on that pavement, so impressive a rouge sheen
Tears shed from my iris
Like I could change the horror
And shrieking like my efforts pious
Calling life, to my side I implore her
For him, I beg her company
For me, I’m no source of council
Though I cry, don’t trouble me
For I’m not the one that woman killed
I can’t express my grief
No petty conglomerate
Could afford me relief
For I’m not the one that woman killed
His blood was steaming
On that September road
By the sidewalk, dun and grey
Like life between its anti and node
I can only cry so much
Before it no longer matters
And it becomes another event, such and such
And its significance becomes a thought, to the floor it clatters.
Don’t cry for me, though I’m rife with ill
I don’t need it
I’m still alive
I’m not the one that woman killed
Think about that body rushed away
On determined heels
To the hospital, on precious time played
His fate, despite man, sealed
I’m not there, no fruit to give
My presence not by his dying side
Though he screams to the empty, futile air
My efforts can’t discourage his departure nigh
Though the sun may rise
Thougt the babe born
Though the shoot will rise
I will still morn
His loss, the rotting human soul
That sits in a wooden box, rested in the solemn hearse
Carried off by the bearer of palls
And buried deep beneath the earth
I’ll lament the loss, I’ve lost it
So very suddenly placed, without abet
This event so caustic
I’m face to face with death
But I’m not the one you should morn
Despite the tears streaming from my face
I’m not the one with the greatest of ills
I’m not the one you should be praying for
For, I’m not the one who that woman killed.

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.

What would happen
If we read “X over X”
As the calculation
It deserves
Instead of so much
Self-serving banter?
We’d find what goes in what
And in quantities unforeseen
As conversing crowds
Among the qualities:
How about this?
“Mind over matter.”
How much matter is within mind,
What pieces of the world
For ideals left behind—
Perhaps what memories
In nutrients we disregard
And the patchwork politics
Between chocolate and hearts
Of artichoke.
What of “ballots over bullets?”
When blood spells the words
We’ve yet to choke
Down?
How many shots will be fired
Before we like band-aids
To wounds apply?
How much violence endures
Till democracy is blest,
How many protests cut down
Before we can lay down the sword?
What of the adage “brains over brawn?”
The well-known oath of courts and kratocrats
With force harp upon?
The strength which one must possess
To prove intelligence
Proves unattained
Yet so many beatings
Are reasoned as recompense—
What sense must be made of pain
To convince us the path of enlightened men
We must avoid
To stay in line.
Thus, submission over freedom
Is where true freedom stems.

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.

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.”

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.

The last of the angels’
Castaway nametags
Hung from the plush red edges
Of the art deco interior.
A breeze from the open door
Cast the doctor’s pamphlets to the floor
Advertising his services
For the special remediation program
Since he could not sleep
What with all the voices
From below chanting his name—
How he envied the people he killed:
For they were spoken so little of.
That is, except for on his intake sheet:
After passing over the names,
Seven in all,
Whose lives were, shameless,
Shed over ***,
The latch clicked
And out came the doctor’s hand
Beckoning through the door
A “come hither” gesture.
On the couch he sat,
Neck conforming perfectly to the couch
As he swam a cascade of Rorschachs
Apart the mirror-faced, owl-like man.
Speaking with a heavy Eastern-European accent
He knew exactly why Elliot had come:
Perhaps the intentions were dubious,
Perhaps he was looking
For quick solutions;
Regardless, Mirror-Face was there to help:
Too easily, these days, was it
To determine dysfunction in the masculine—
And this case was rare,
Awash in chatter from below.
So, there must be something deeper
Rooted in fear of perpetual
Romance fetishism
And absence of its referent.
Yes! The penetrative is missing—
The limerant object
Is without form, shapely, and feminine
And would forever escape him,
In part by suicide,
In part by isolation.
The reason you are here
Is the absent-present offspring
Of such missing ***,
A veritable porcupine-dilemma
In the flesh, a show of insufficient ****** capital—
See now in this face of mine.
Yes, now that I’ve diagnosed
What ails
Let us explore what solutions
Could have been:
The living world does offer suitable surrogates
For those lacking—
Recognizing this is the first step
To being forgotten,
To allow you to sleep.
Yes, you recognized then
The gun as the extension of the phallus
And it levels the playing field
Raised up, aroused by power
One feels when operating heavy machinery—
Yes, all flesh which is the metaphorical egg,
The bullet is the *****,
Which penetrates the flesh of the paramour
Impregnating her with life inverted
And creates, in death,
The child of ****** frustration.
While this child is one of children lost,
It is child nonetheless.
Yes, and this gun, the metal *****,
***** not one
But many—in fact, incestuously,
It ***** entire families,
Entire communities,
And leaves their lives gravid
With your legacy.
Yes, it is the only way to create
The ultimate matron, the universal feminine,
The supreme m-Other
For the Supreme Gentleman.
And you, as you see me,
Are the absent-present of this child of death
This union of bullet-***** and the whole-body womb,
With which you, sadly, impregnated yourself.
But, here’s the secret,
Because of this, you can only do damage control:
Your child will prevail.
Yes, the name may be gone, but the child prevails.
Name may be gone, but child prevails.
Name gone, child here.
So, have the voices stopped?
Has the child matured in you?
You are on your way to being forgotten,
But the child lives on:
Yes, the name may be gone, but the child prevails.
Name may be gone, but child prevails.
Name gone, child here.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hills ablaze
In the western sky
Smoke, it coils
Through the atmosphere
Leaving the eastern half
Charred and black
Of what the twilight could not sear.
It burns with ardor,
That western hill
The trees are tongues
And burning still
With kindling sun
Departing there.
The western coals
Can only stare
Coming hence, a blackenedness
Whose colors echo
Back and forth
From ebon South
To eerie North
There it seeks
To call it: “mine”
From black to purple
Blue—yellow
From there an angry Clementine
For sunk beneath
The faint embers
Did go indignance of the red.
The last to go
A calming blue
It leaves so peaceful
A daylight dead.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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