i prefer the company of animals to human company
as the eight years passed before i embarked on a quench
of seeing my thought coded in phonetic symbols,
because i can enjoy the company
of animals, whether petted or wild
reduced to only speaking certain onomatopoeias
that i pluck from the depth of galloping
horses in gallop re-imagined
with the tides' waves...
and have the bounty of my incision of choices
to be ably riddled by sorrow
sowed by the end of a poet's output:
to weep at the beauty of certain songs...
indeed here i laid my armour with naked breast;
it does endear this stone heart of mine
to remain its size when the changes came,
to remain its size upon crossing the threshold
of that well accounted for the first step
on the styx of psychosis that lasted year upon year,
and in me such mistrust of fellow man grew,
that i simply burnt all bridges i could have
walked across, and only in writing looked back,
wept until no former reality of images' recurrence
was extinguished like even the wettest nibble of coal
taken on the gallows of two flint stones struck
for a spark of glitter and promethean ingenuity
with chinese kaleidoscopes of coloured alveoli;
that each tree except the pine branches out
with the first image, the y of the tetragrammaton:
upon the bypass bridge over a highway
where machines echo to former hoof and hot snout
sneeze, looking south at london fiery in the lost
silver sheen of the moon that now only cradles
the inward looking things which allow the lunar
light to provide man's sight the opiates
of balanced mercury kept for the libra of what
maxim serves better purpose now
than it did with the counter-reformation:
i too, among the renaissance painters,
the willing pauper of attire, with such depths of
origins that might make emerald jealous have lived
to be as unchanging as the comet's oval orbit,
to live day upon day akin to a fox's fur never shed
or in chameleon rainbows quick to change
for the last sprout of quickened rain into the
airy earth breathed with geological history of layering;
i too took to their concerns,
play the role in pauper's attire, for only
in work are there riches of what would drive some men mad;
only in work, in this continuum too complex
to specify - let this never rise about to clothe you
as identifiably having pope sixtus iv being your patron.