i'm ready to misspell your name
and ready to write a poem, and weep,
and drink: no sight of Saturn's meteor rings
to quench all lunar orbits could ever equal
you: whether in painting,
or in mirror, or in ghostly glass of an atlas....
god.... i'm abstracting you
by way of erasing memory!
in acronym s.t.a.y.
i'll give you my bog shelf of time,
the stinking pit of worthy portrait;
but then the canvas of constellations
is too unfathomable,
and even if i succeed at a body bound to
defeat, even if my thought rises
to a Martian soul of constant warring,
i am but
               death's defeat,
               on the consistency of repeated life;
for the Hindu credo speaks of the death
of death as the tongue lap dancing to the tune
of reincarnation, where nihilism is necessary,
to gather the self within the canvas of
knowing nothing, and yet painting something;
absolved on the banishment of signature with caricature.