Sunless steeples toppled the fonts of your apocrypha
The mumbled harbingers of guilt's ascendancy
The icicles of the chandeliers dripping
Carbuncle tears, as the ransom of sullen lives
Many Sundays saw the closing of word-stiffened pages
In the hands of the blue-suited multitudes,
In homage of cathedrals filled up with dead Lilies
The pure must wear dark colors, in a kind of fake humility
While the evil wear white alone, in broad strokes of denial
And attention is a weather vane spinning madly
At the top of the world, wanting only God to be watching
only God to be watching
only God to be watching

If time were a star, lived only in your eyes
I'd feign uncertainty, before your bright surprise;
And if nights were gifts, nobody could return,
I'd pray to wake, upon your star that burn..

In calm waves of imaginings  I am mermaid,
Always chasing you through the towering tides,
Disappearing between each scalloped crest;
Only my tail visible, sticking out at odd angles.

I have lean, strong swimmer's muscles; I can swim for miles,
Nearly keep up with submarines, ships, ferry’s,
For a limited time. My hair tumbles down
As though a nest, like *****, twisted seaweed
Around my face’s shipwreck-glass eyes
And sunscald lips.

I follow keenly the scent;
Something, someone who’s precious- human scent,
Pungent, earthy, vivifyingly attractive,
Counterpoint to the ocean’s ambergris.

Meanwhile there’s only horizons of teal water all around me,
And roving sky above; my sole company most days.
I swim with just the barest hint
Of whispered memories,
Something so far and long ago;
He who knew well the secret heart of me,
Within my fishy innards
And  in spite of my appearance.

Sometimes a stray dolphin befriends me,
And travels for a distance beside me;
Speaking in strange, native high-pitched dolphin talk;
And dolphins are interesting, but they are not men,
And they can’t comprehend what is it I follow

In the blind, long-aching of unknown distance,
Or what I pine for nightly, in my roiling watery soul
In the solitary caves, of this twilight world.

The peace that war knows
Wasn’t purchased with dripping blood;
The war that peace knows
Wasn’t punctured by artillery sounds.

The peace the dead know
Wasn’t bought by a furrowed brow;
The war not known to the dead,
Feels all the same to them, as peace.

Knowing neither wars,
Nor that the dead are dead;
Shouldn’t we be jealous-
And wish it were us, instead?

These nerves know all the ticking of seconds
In your syncopated ecstasies, and this flesh knows
When you've reached the edge,
There's no going backwards again.
This mind knows all the precise pinpricks
Of patience, wherever you've veered to wander.
But somehow, this world cannot disband
Its crystalline self, before disbelieving eyes;
Can never follow the ordered layers peeling away:
Everything will still be as solid, as fragrant
As vertiginous, restless in inhibition,
Expressing the scaled continuum of resolute being,
When your nerves are finally stilled,
And your flesh is growing already colder.
But my unruly mind will no longer grasp then
Its footprints in carefully metered seconds;
But only in the leaping of frayed centuries, in aqueducts;
The rivers racing forward, into blind uncharted distance
Yet undreamed of, hidden under moonless nights;
Forests folded under the weight of eons, suddenly registered,
Calamities sped up to meet the counterpoint
Of time's new frowning dissonance;
And how quickly the wood begins to warp,
The rusted gallows to peek through, all the torn tapestries weaving.

Our empty syncopation's are patiently ambushed
By restless margins of undeclared territory;
Shivering cymbals, entraining cloistered memories,
A nimbus inclining toward unredeemable quarries:
Refrains unimagined, of star-tipped dawns
Upon certain days of ritual, unbelievably worn.

Breathing dragons of fire-squandering meridians
Pour round water upon semblance's drowned emotion;
Cleave then to me, who cleaves to the last vestige
Of rarefied air, breathed by bellows-smothered centuries
When your foot trod the newly opened ****** earth,
And your hand hinged loves diagonal, even unto death.

Genitalia are so amorphous;
They have no chance at heart or conscience.
Identifying characteristics; maybe,
But who spends time studying such a thing?

They are only the messenger;
First at knowing ecstasy,
Last to realize abandonment,
The body's inherently secret code
Attempting to speak the rhythms
Of everyman's language:
Bitmap of the soul's holiest desires.

They can't diagnose trouble,
Or predict rejection:
They are only the saddle upon an unbroken horse;
And wildness all that ever breathes,
Through it's foaming nostrils.

And what is desire, but the body's own fire?