O, cry morning,      sun breaks again

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

O, sigh morning      as inverted

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

O, shy morning.         churlishly answering questions never

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

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

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

O, blithe morning.          Such cringing in place

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will walk a road
Of rimed old men and invisible children
A barren scape, all uniform and erudite
A scene to some, so meaningless and sullen,
But to me, I crave such to behold a ****** white.
Corrupt, it is not, despite my trek.
At Peace, my soul, at rest.
Baptize this ailing body, come the advent of night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Luna
Carrier
Take my serenade
If this earthly love escapes
Then loving doors forbade!
Come, send my plea
Whilst I trace her constellation
And you, both
Hidden from mine eyes
Trace her hand, her heart, her eyes
To the other’s harmonization
If but for one night
Pity me, or give my heart
To her
The one, I know it true,
That you and I, Moon,
Both smile upon.
She whose eyes
Like lunar seas
So deep that hide such mystery
Whose hair enwraps my world
Like many-a brown meridian
From top to bottom
With energy
From end to world’s end.
Whose shadowy nature
Like paradox
Alights with creamy luminescence
To outshine her companion stars
And rears my gaze Heavenward
And implores my footfall north
To cross infinity on cadence and tune
Wishing to be where she stands
Her sublunary perilune.
Oh, I’m mad, I’m mad
Poor, Moon my only ear
For you are not the woman
Whom I wish, this song, to hear
And yet I dream
Beneath the Moon
Which I hope she dreams into
That this dream
Beneath the moon
Is one she dreams of too.

Oh, Muse, bemused me, no true self have I
Many a-mask have fallen to paint me
My canvas is contrite and still I lie
And, oh, for Fortune you’re denied to see
What foul bristles wash and stroke mien anew
Today was blue, yester a shade gayer,
Tomorrow, expect my art gift to you
Quick, more pastels! New friends, another layer
But, like any piece, Time wills it ‘way fade.
And perfection tainted by the past one,
Please ask yourself, who amongst is not made?
And whose vibrant colors have not mixed dun?
Come, let’s look on at my new piece,
So the patrons of my art ever increase.

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

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

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

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

The greatest eye, seeing as I see: infinity infinitely,
Passing and being amidst mere seconds, touching glassily
Fringes of the smallest universe of me,
The happier side of the sublime, distant fingers of distant peaks
Combing the edge of time.

I’ve stared at the stars too long, we saw them dance out of space
More dimensions than a singularity, for it opens up
As hearts do in each other placed.
From fixéd gaze and placidity, I stride in awe to you
We could feel one with acatelepsy

Have what some consider few, and few consider all
Intertwined by the darkness between the dying stars’
Existence, in that both skins a whole that glistens.
Of that place, I in constant drawn, that vacuity, that candoris

A promise that, regardless what season, my face feels apricity
And careless are the places as numinous are the lariots
Whether through Hell or usurping Pheobus’ chariot
Some hope may birth within the open dark
The treasured lunar retinue, a web of inspiration, generations to come;

That’s what keeps me hopeful here, a shy star in the void
Across it all, across life-lines I shall have,
Before you ever meet me, long since dissipated—
Come out to see me and play, or are you simply? Belated?
In that web, the growing ever-on, generative swan-songs,

And the one I wish on may befall a stellar death, my sky
Alighted by one less, a part of me to the cold and shiftless earth
That though the stars may fall, these hearts may flash chimerical
Etched limpid in the palimpsest of memory, they are, they will
Hearts of the little universe, consumptive and resilient

And kept ever on, there beyond Jupiter and his moons thereof
In which chaos finds itself bathed and bound by Love.

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

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.

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.

There was magic at work there, some protecting veil
I felt beyond the mobile cab, gestalt, with its felt-angelic wings
Anew, I felt safe on that bend and wind of 322.
The needle at ¾ heading back the country road
From the quiet haven of West Chester, PA, towards here:
Oh, in awed—amazed the simplicity, we both looking
Back on the other: one loquacious and I speechless,
And simple was the history—a thousand stories and I
I picked mine!—Its grantedness between the golden parallels
My incipience of joy cutting through the last dust of the silos
The thronging corn and coral-bugs celebrating me
Or is it with me, that much too.
If I had never been down yon, I feel as though I’d know your
Serpentine nostalgia all along the miles’ track
As kept as if my birthright.
Beauteous a gateway to the Juniata-home, though miles
Away from here and subject to an absent roam.
Its waves may roil ‘gainst my native door,
‘Tis this your patchwork sister on which we humans drew
That equates paths, that pining name, that road 322.
And, oh, as before I knew of thou distant eyes
Despairingly all recollections of home in the Gallery
Of Autumn fruit: plucked, transient, and rotting.
This music! Music can’t help—I hear highschool in the chords
Playing in the lyrics, transformed by my design
As meaningful, self-serving words and they all burned
And brand to home if I, if I ever can again.
But where would I go, where do wizened lines end?
Written in sullen, maddened road maps, words to that history
All my own—does it write in the river, end in the mouth?
Or the Appalachian Eden, taken on the river’s vein
To my little fall of man, a threshold barred by flaming swords
That of hate and of command, miles fatten as years accrue
Go distant past the western sun,
Down,
Down,
PA-322.

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.

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.

Peace in emptiness
The pale scope this circle is,
Like a shawl draped tightly on my neck
The sky hangs with intimacy
And yet so distant and emotionally raw
Its biting breath attests
Confined to converse with a babbling stream
And speak so vapidly
One can see, so peacefully
Thin veins, they creep on water’s top
Its vitals miserably languid, slow
And the fish condemned to stop
The sounds, the scene consume in silence
And make the world one
Because I sit here in defiance
To its outside I am numb.
Is this Peace? Perhaps, perhaps.
If it’s all alone
Because this is kind of lovely peace
The world does bemoan
I wish its concrete impermanence
Their busy lives atone,
For subtle sanctuary and plot for one’s high throne
I say to you, that you can find
Here, with me, all alone.
The leaves can be our wallpaper
The grass, exquisite rug
These stones, china of antiquity
Carved in Orient fashion
The moss will be our bedding
The hills our occupation
The fields will be our sustenance
The pond, couples' libation
I’ll christen this house, and you my bride
With gems of pretty ether
We’ll be each other’s sole possession
My hand will rest beneath her
Love the world, our home, our home
You and I, our love outlasting
Here, at Peace, and all alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

I cannot feign the hate have men
For Winter’s barrenness
Dull and brown are hill and fen
But, oh, I cherish this.
How grey, empty the winter sky
Bitterly watching the Springtime die.
But bare, the wash, as painter’s pallet
And canvas cleaned anew
It lacks obstruction and blots of paint
From plumes of trees up high;
It opens up, so beautifully
Without undue or blotchy dye.
What’s more creative, liberating
Than perceptions’ application
Upon the canvas of winter portraits
Of open sky ruminations?

Though paths remain uncrossed
And souls still give a friendly gesture,
The local haunts are still shuttered
To those that brave these occult and rural roads.
The busted macadam speaks volumes
Written in its faults those riddles and anecdotes
Long kept in the spirit of the place
And the etchings of otherwise mute country spaces.
Such is the clarion of a hero’s return
On the lips of a medium, forever for profit
Incanting enchantments upon grounds
Which formed his genesis and the ash he became.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Delusions of that throbbing arrogant wound
Have played tricks on these eyes before
To all soothsayers and falsifiers with words
So dulcimer as they are harmful to restful nights.
This is the true passing of the hero:
A loss of a child’s wonder to the silver lines
In the unnatural twinning of reality and make-believe
As sung from cardstock ramparts of an ocean of carpet.
There is no looking backwards to a road disappearing
With the valley’s crushing winds to my back though
The battle grounds and olive trees suspending offerings of peace
Run headlong in their respective directions, those unrealities: present, past.
Only spirits can hold time’s scales
With such precision or precariousness
As preternature may devise—
Those creatures of children’s books.

Or so the flicker of passing trees conceit.

Smoke crafts the forms of three adolescents
Jogging along the culverts of the West Fall hill:
Among them, the long-haired boy I know, face as though a mirror
In fear, I fire my arrow straight and true in the name of reason.

They scatter into the fronds of wheat and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.

Or so the flicker of passing wheat conceits.

I come to the shores of that river where young men dive
Inside the crater that grave of bicycles inured twelve in all
Attempting to dredge the depth for a lost frivolity
And the scattered refuse of the year before: perhaps a trading card.
I throw myself to westward skies out from that sylvan steppe,
Whose lustrating turgid flow repelled the revenant of the past.
May its purity allow me to meditate upon its unwavering face,
And it shall shine back stern with an idol of a comforting familiar.
As it opens its eyes, halfway, its clear aspect scatters
Beneath the inflatable tubes where, hand-in-hand and sweetly as birds
The voices of those long-haired wraiths: the girl of his fancy,
Whose name was destined to be cast aside in the autumn wind.

They pass beneath and I utter futile words of advice
To ask of him: do things differently.
And they seem to listen.
Or so the flicker of the passing stream conceits.

And, oh, the mountains rise as the curtain
Upon which a young poet casts dispersions
And anger for the sclerotic moments in flowery metaphors,
For there at the altar of renunciation, one can only speak in tongues.
And over the young poet, the fog hangs lazily to mark the world’s turning away:
A blinding of witness to his offerings, the deafening of ears to his word.
For I am no mere present, but the possession of that which looms
And that which as passed—for whom am I, the present, a memory?
Yet, this knowledge sates all hunger and quenches thirst
For those wounds, those ashes,
Those songs written deeply
Have proven fertile for genesis before.

Or so the flicker of passing dreams conceit.

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

I couldn’t help but notice the concern on your face
As I loosed my hands to fall from grace
Into the flames
That lapped at your feet.
You warned me this was hell, those scabs and sores
From the fire,
But not your sore hands on the boiled rung
Nor your dry eyes or crowd you’re among
Nor the dense developments that seem so dire
I let go, anyway
And scattered my life like seeds
Straight into the vacuous winds
To grow elsewhere
And fall into everything
In the face of the fire regime.
The pain was real, you saw me writhing
Through the smoke;
What you didn’t hear was my laughter
And your name through my lips
As I called up from a field of molded rye
What the forests had to tell
And that we’ve been here on various trips.
Do you forget why you hang over the fire?
Dry your tongue from nonsense and spit?
Declare your freedom from pain and it?
It’s the safest you’ve ever been
To fear without guessing and calling it sin
From ashes a forest rises not asking for repentance
For life, we thank what death has lent us.

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

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.

To exhale
Compresses the chest
And in its place
Some chilblains,
Disgust for its being,
An annihilation
A ferocious hunger for itself,
Like the ouroboros
In every breath
Tempted by a life
For the moment gone.
To inhale
Invites it back,
A dispassionate process, no less.
The life thus stolen away
Impotent to the next breath
That I must exhale.
On this breath there comes a fear
A longing or
The urge
To lift my hands to my throat
And keep the life in my lungs
To quit exhaling
And never feel that way again.

Five years from my end of days and, shall there,
Does a verse go on tell me—was it beautiful
Like breaking windows, battered wind chimes?
I groaned to hear when history cried
That hum in Death, the silent ode, a sallow sound

Made, was your time, to sole destroy,
But, I promised your parade I would not shake
My fist to the sky—for somewhere, you would be.
Yes, absolving dreams—committing them to fade
But, yes, they fell like the snow: all around—

In the present, the past comes ‘round—ah!
My suffering is ever turning, the edges running raw.
But, I promised, I would forget—your only wish
Was n’er to be a memory, never to use apologies as
Laurels for my victory—I can’t be happy alone.

I wrote this for you some years before, long before
We were children, long before both we were born.
You danced like light, effervesced in contradiction
A love that was you-I and a bead restful in my hand
We suffered separation ‘till life, and bore flesh along.

Five years from my end of days, gold can’t travel
Nor chameleon, needless to say I knew this was one
Our parent from thence I came, to you, to me, i-you returns,
Last one last thing in darkness burns: I to see recurrently
I knew before we were ever born, all those years ago,

A dazzling iteration of extinct, mellifluous joy, that
Though on pyrrhic terms is all in all a mystery,
When five days pass we will be each other, I sleep up
And set my lips for nihility and awe, kissing at the azure bare
To float as a dream to your stars that constellate there.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Even the diviner was bemused by these channels, lost in my palm
Amidst the faults and erosions the like as November
Where, banal, it caught these skipping stones, day-to-day, arranged
For the radical saccades to pass, engross, my attention through the magic,
I now stare at Delphi, what binds the assumed catches
Bound, itself, to shy
To shy away from their centers.

But, now and then, my eyes will sojourn from my wanton ways
Through terraces of an empty map,
Where, by degrees, are shown their invisibilities in place of illustrations
Accoutered as décor, but fact, hastening a spider’s game:
Fixed in a drawer, renewed, splayed, drawn at constant.

These pickings, righteous, at a nail and toying on a salty lip,
Quiver, from the rector, day and night, pronouncing
Idle me, idolatry, standing at spreading concourse,
Till, evermore, my stumbling thoughts lose themselves
In my hand.

The hand.
The palm.
Lost channels flood themselves silt-rich waters boatful and boastful
Take on the name of fjord and trinity,
At which I stand, beside myself, and him, beside himself
More engrossed by far-flung ecstasies,
Quite-clear those instabilities, reaching for liquor—mid-shelf.

I could, perhaps, blind myself to the valleys—simple marked sleight of hand
But, travail those four peaks and their straining caps of snow
Unknown, it is but the larger picture, sewn to sinew runs of hair.

Too much, I plead for direction or sign, getting lost in mirrors or rhyme
These new utterances in the back of my throat, where, precisely,
Is the seat of pride,
Each a reckless trail back to the temples of uncharted weathered skin
—The vaguenesses that she enthralled, as to what I am read
Thinking nothing at all and, he, the friend of ever
Under the same stars to the north, south, in every direction.
So helpless, cold shaking and pensions of the moon, anon,
I read as the distance, empty candescences that thirst to know
Exactly what they should have known, where clairvoyance falls short
Steps, like quite brushstrokes: one at a time, wide, unending.

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

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

My eyes fail me, the spirit is but a ripple, an echo
Afloat on the sun cast waters
With parting gifts and wine
The hands, the toil, push me on
But,
It’s pretty, the ripple, the sky and I
Like bodies at a funeral
My soul crying
Mouths are sighing
"How very pretty the evening sky looks"
As it looks back on us, two bodies,
Day and me
Dead and dying, dying, dying.

New zeniths, gold peaks, wrought art by the dawn
Replete i’a chorus befitting a god
Surreal i’ the sound, arrest hearts to beat on
Perfect not i’ the void of song, of we awed
We be humbl’d by that seraphic tenor
And that feigned haughtiness, urge, morale arise!
Hoist high the gift which holds none the better
Evoking the spirits in a calm’d sea of eyes
Turned aloft, to masks or tried bounds of that range,
Caught on the line betwixt life and a fantasy
We watch and we wait for our lives’ swift change
I lament for the throngs, you, that won’t see
Souls alight brilliantly, rushed by your song
And who will forget you when you are gone?

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

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

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

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

A flurry descends
Upon this town
Like a snow globe
Shaken up and down.
Given time
It does settle
Disappearing on
Glass and metal.
And when it stops
Then starts again
Squalls abreast
All down the glen
The clouds will tumble
And grey the dome
--Above the sky
--Above this home,
The winds, they sway
The wire of phones
The sun that shines
Once was not shone
While snow once more
Flung to the air
Where it lingers and tarries there
Then to rest on house and stone
To claim the earth that was its own
My fingers retract from the window pane
To watch it start
Then stop again.

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.

This early winter has already slipped from the macadam,
Bloats the creek I see
From the perch of rusted manhole covers
Their tunnels rush with concrete.

It falls over the v-shaped Two-Log dam,
It whispers to me
I’ve come close to
Nothing, to nothing, to nothingness,

I’ve heard the babbling, the incomprehensible echo
Of my own voice
In the abyss of being, that, if I spoke
It taunted back, in a voice
Rife
With truth.

Redemption of solidity has me now,
This is where I grew up:
Along the same creek, along the flow and course of man
Crossing the winter’s water has proven
Test, trial, and victory
Every time. I never noticed it.

Apathy is a vague blur in the saccade of the last few years,
Self-destructed by the fault of feeling.
I am more human now, returning to the shores of limitation,
Of the piercing history
Still young, but wizened, hard, a court
At which I stood and begged for my head.

I have but my name now, and nothing to return to
But the temporary homes with temporary people.

If I said I don’t care, I was wrong. They were my temple,
But the god of me, the god of them, the god of sheer youthful joy
Has been overtaken by grapevines, by ivy

And I still proclaim victory, still proclaim
I won the fight of isolation.

From the frozen bed of silt and winter
I pull concrete chips from the bridge
They destroyed ten years prior, where once I stood
And added my sorrows to the ebon stream, carrying it
To the end of it, where end met end,
And continued on end-to-end.

But I have seen nothing and no end it quite like it,
For every shore has its mirror,
And beyond it is my voice, I cast out,
Calling back,
As it was.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 ****.

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.

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.

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

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

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