when the sun breaks through clouds
and those photogenic rays stream down
shot in the glorious clarity of our own lens
you cannot help but look in awe
from afar you can say: What Grace!
Yet while within you cannot
notice the beauty surrounding
what a sad truth of life
no one knows they swim in holy
unless they see with outside eyes

Remember this? Remember this.
When I told you of Parameters.
Built around to self protect?
Well, those walls are not fixed,
The world is wont to move, to change
And how they change!

Sometimes a man shows you his heart's part.
You take it and see; you give your same's key.
Then sometimes you have no choice,
the heart alone breaks down your walls
as the heart wants to do, to break.
And how it does break.

The heart's a glass dagger, and in its struggle shatters.
But even broken glass still cuts and bores,
after a cup, built of diamond shrapnel shivs, falls
and finds a home in a little boy's tender foot.
But even after the offender has been removed,
whenever he steps down, he feels it still there.

And he's afraid to walk ever again.
And the floor is like his personal enemy.
And any glass is like a bomb mocking him.
And he wears double socks when he's at home.
And he sits in the tub and he picks and rubs.
And he lies in bed all morning wondering,

"And when will my heart stop aching?"
And he hobbles along in the world.
And he puts on a strong face.
And he wants to move forward without the pain.
And he wants so much not to fear anymore.
And he wants so much just to love at all.

We were a beleaguered bard born,
a chief in chatoyant charms charged with
the principle petrichor of passionate paramours;
to drive the dainty dalliances
of incipient ingénues immured in
glamourous gossamer gowns;
lilting, lead lissome lads 'long labyrinthine love;
mischeiviously make mellifluous mondegreens;
sing of such serendipity: surreptitiously susurrous sessions
scintillas of Spring's sempiternal sentiments!

But fetching fugues fade fast, felicity's fated to fly. For
penumbral poets, it portends a pyrrhic pay.
We wander woebegone, waiting wistfully.
Lovers leave lyricists to languish in lonely lassitude.
The halcyon heyday has harbingered
inbroglio in the inured inventor of infatuation.
Why? With what wherewithal?
Often our offerings off us, opposite of, obviously, obtaining, or,
lucidly: lyrical lacers of Love likewise lack its livening lagniappe.

I often forget how to write.
            Not because I am happy,
                        and, as they say, happiness writes white.
            Nor for any lack of sadness,
                        for, as I see, sadness is a bottomless ink well.
            But for any wild and outrageous feeling,
                        any like spirit who possesses my hand to start --
                                    with awesome, judging faces sliding on the ceiling,
                                                icons of the mother and god-child
                                                       ­     dripping down eternal blue and martyr red,
                                                            ­            like arms hanging, waking, pinning!
                                                        ­                            "Woman, behold your son!"
                                                           ­                                   Behold me, my THC and psilo-sin life,
                                                           ­                                   an endlessly whirling maelstrom of emotion!
                                                        ­    flanked by monstrous, winged choirs of Motown
                                                          ­              slinging fiery spears, gold rays penetrating!
                                                    ­                                "Oh, oh, God!" The Ecstasy of St. Philip!
                                                         ­                                     Visions of horse-hung hosts and celestial orbs,
                                                           ­                                   Heaven's dynamo, an **** of screws and cogs!
                        -- are hid.


I too watched the best minds of my generation,
            anesthetized by sanity in a bottle
                        (id est: pills, pills, pills, pills, pills);
            mesmerized by patterns of flashing lights
                        of digital desperation crying, "affirm me, friend me!" -;
            drowned in an endless sea under a twilight of information
                        or else cats, cats, cats, cats, cats;
            and ever afeard of mortal judgment.
                       “Big boys don’t cry” (so poets do in breathy meter).

A generation asleep
           - and though in hopeful dream -
                      We are placid.
                      We work obedient.
                      We speak soft.
                                 Because the whole world is medicated now.
                                 Because the whole world is fixed.

And I wonder if there is a Spirit.
           I think, if there is,
                      We have drugged her.
                      We have ravished her.
                      We have wasted her.
                                 And the whole world is silent now.
                                 And the whole world is fixed.