On an old seashore,

you are a monk in sacred clothes,

bowing slowly to forgotten

in the goodness of the night,

giving new life to your dreams

I am your Somnolence Queen,

and invite the sister moon

touch your eyelids, touch your light

drifting, drifting, drifting burdens

golden, golden, golden  stars

falling, fallin, falli, fall, fall, fa, f, ...

on your brrriiiggghhhttt sleeeping

forehead sleeeeeep, sleeeeeeping  deeeeeep,

I am your Somnolence Queen,

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
The sun brightens tardily
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.
he fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly
The genius of plenitude
Houses himself elsewhwere. Our folk thin
Lamentably.

Against the saturated
Horizon of dawn,
Loitering in the dark timbre
Of emerging consciousness -
Dissipating somnolence
And preemptive despair,
Tacitly adumbrate the
Yawning abyss.
Chastened by the cunning and
Lubricious nihilism,
Igniting fermented provocations,
Silent subterfuge; death,
By mirth - the inane;
Lament of the mundane.

Fallow paradigms, accretions of
The last gasp -
Evaporating empty liturgies
Of suspicion;
Charity and equanimity -
Lost in confinement,
Triumphant avarice bearing
Descendants
Of intransigence;
Wielding imperious
Schemes of orthodoxy.

Pollard fragments of
Silken tapestry,
Miasma draped depression
Abridging;
Conversely,
Permuted flurries of anxiety
Dislodge
The vestiges of meaning
That abide
In brazen equivocation.

Tributaries of dogma reach
Their confluence,
Watershed moment,  
Numinous effusion
Streams naked epiphany,
The precarious vision -
A gesture of providence,
Certainty and contingency;
Gratuitously derivative, life
Equals choice.

Verdant branches of intention;
And opportunity the vine,
Live forward -
The pen, my voice,
Piquant conduit pouring,
Exuberant wine.

Footprints found in givenness
Underline,
Penumbrae of my soul;
Mirrored silhouettes,
Thoughts and words engender;
And in verse adorn
Fecund soil, Line after line,
The cosmos altered,
Continuum of permanence -
Artist’s art articulating
Essence of my imagination,
I proliferate, I design
Phrases unique,
Participation mystique.

Words creating world,
The apparatus of infinity
Heidegger, ontologically precise,
Language -
The house of Being,
Ineffable, Promethean
Literary devise -
Envisioning possibility,
And abundance to allow,
I occur
Inhabit
Manifest
Future phenomena
Experienced as now.

©2008 & ©2011 W.S. Warner

the bottle twists
glass falls in drifts
and air parts like flesh

there’s a terror beneath this city
trucks enter from out of town and shake the power lines
passing without pause

sometimes birds gather for days
chirps grow exponentially
before tailing into silence;
heather and brimstone
little bodies roll to the edges
and burst on the streets in red regalia

a somnolence keeps the city forgetful
time flows in fits
a streetlamp; a raven; ten gravestones
it all runs without moving

vessels dilate
hands hold themselves

there’s nothing to breathe with
an empty chalice, turned on the hour grants
heaving clenching writhing
an ocean of rust
bulb shatters, blood spills out her
mouth cave head turn faith
the world remakes itself
*******
the colour of sunflowers
bicycle chains
thirst
colonialism
wet paint

emptiness over emptiness
act without agent
lack lack lack lack lack lack lack lack lack lack lack
peel the flesh and find flesh
always more flesh
don’t stop they know better
chirp chirp chirp
turn
exit
substance
purpose
nothing

Moon in Scorpio.
Incurable somnolence.
Plutonian pranks.

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

everything's blacked out,
reigning over me are dark clouds,
incapacitated in awe and standing still,
nimbus clouds rain on me as I sleep sound.

lackadaisically waking up,
yawning as I walk outside, finding,
labyrinths of an ideal reality,
enamored with self-confusion and insanity.

roaming around aimlessly,
obfuscated in perpetuity,
maddened and under the weather,
adamantly rejoicing in the sorrowful rain.

Apathy, alogy and ethos, dreaming.
I spent hours lying on a bed,
My bed it seems.
Neither really asleep
nor truly awake, rather,
I drifted through states-between
and had no will,

My will had evaporated and in its wake
did flow a rivulet of dreams.
This dreamstuff, gleaming, is not memory but
the thing-between;

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt a constant emptiness that lingers as you shake the sleep from your eyes as I have. I hardly get any sleep as it is, nowadays. How I think I think too much and altogether too little, only if I managed to string my words together better I wouldn’t be all loose ends and frayed knots. I’ve wrung my thoughts dry with the weight of my memories to watch the blood drain from my bones; knuckles white and brittle, hollow. They bloom red in my anger, concrete cracking under my skin, peeling in layers till I can’t distinguish my injuries from the chaos. I’m saying all this because I wish you would stay, would’ve stayed - tenses slip past me - but it’s too late now, has forever been too late.

I guess that this is my way of saying I still love you.

I did, I will, I do.

(A.H.Z)

The desert is not the grave of the sea.

The heaving reign of pharaohed seas,
Rule in bloodline of palm wine and embalming fluid of brine.
The tides are their mummified lips,
Whispering the coming forth of spells eternally to the sky.  
All goddesses, like shawled Isis, in lamentations of hair
And past-wept somnolence for Egypt,
Lie across the heart-bound murmur of waters
From their dead kings and the kingly divine, Amun-Ra,
Whose bird-starred eyes fill the canopic jar of the cosmos.

The sea is the grave of the desert.