There,
I sat on the bench under the chandelier of twistin' florids
After quivers against winds from a turning season
And blessed the earth carpeted with decaying leaves
Where October forespent upon the feathery bank
So I hung my hammock between the trees
And rested my head like a good ol' vagabond

My sketchbook is full of your symbols
Sure I did drink coffee in the morning
But still hazy I am of you

I played with foams aphrodisiac
As I rowed a wooden skiff with my oars
Over a river of many dreams I folded manyfold
So I praised this holy enclave of lights so beatific
For a mill in the dew bobbed nigh a brook so bucolic
I taught birds to sing like O tengo duende, cariño!
Highland cattles flocked around me in curiosity

The empty breezeway records lolling memories like a music box
I remember that old professor with faded glasses
Looking so profound but frankly tired
Saw something in me, and I felt understood

Transparent orgamis slowly penchéd to the sound of violin
On the surface of a calm lake
In an early morning
Where a Valais Blacknose stretched out its heavy trunk and
Quenched its thirst, with love, in peace

Whereon sylph perched the silky meadow that opalescent day
Like a whirring strand in shimmers of whiskey
Briefly, she became a gossamer of wind, and
A page in a disheveled fairytale
Whose lore records old tales beyond the translucence of time

A staircase of golden butterflies kissed her
To the elevation of this leaf of scripture:
   Praise the rugged humanity of thine
   Thou are a size of what thou see, and
   The world is what thou take
So did she curl her tail the arctic fox of dawn

The devils I've fought with
Will defend me like Atticus Finch
For I fought the fight I must fight
With style, with sheer tenacity
Like an ancient vagabond, an honorable one

When the Epoch of High Romance arrives
Leave a bouquet over my grave
And bury me again under the white wilderness
Whereon sylph left the silky meadow that opalescent night

Had I embroidered a heavenly handkerchief
enwrought with hisibcus, like your blushing lips, and clean beau brown, like your eyes
laced with exquisite patterns the universe devised,
made of the finest threads of vicuña and baby cashmere
I'd collect your tears like blue diamonds so dear
and keep it in my surest vault where nobody knows
because they are the rarest gems on earth
but I only have my words and this beating heart
so I've weaved them so gently like that handkerchief
and written this lyrical enjambment
for your consolation

There was an armless man biking on an empty street,
When the bell tolled at the midnight hour.
Between the emaciated ribs had stench diabolical
Everyone called him crazy.
A phantom of the city, he is. Perhaps, death himself.
A trail of breath. Ragged bandages barely hid his nakedness.  
Burnt was his hollow eye. Disfigured was his nose.
Like a disgraced soldier refusing to come home
The boy know only twelve springs!

Through a broken glass window of a beat-up car
Saw three whisperers an army of fanatics of midnight chase,
Blaring red and no blue.
“Why y’all here, brother?”
“Innocence. Innocence only”
They ain’t here to catch us. Too many. They are here to **** us.
Bullet holes on the car doors, motionless organic bodies
Blood on the concrete and
Silence, after all!

A foreign couple walked on the street.
BAMM! The fallen! A suicide!
No, it was the poor armless boy!
Help! For God’s sake, Help!
Curtains closed, yellow rooms unlit  
And nobody gave a single ******* look.

I have a perpendicular sword in my heart
My bashful confession sticks to my uvula, in-between my teeth
Being understood I dread, the communion of souls
I recoil cowardly from the projection on a winding heath
Floaded is this shoal with devils all agog

I planted a fake bouquet by a tree.
At which hour rain knocks the lifeless beauty brooding
Ov'r the sighs of thirsty roots

Will you comfort my fictitious spirit?
Golden dust falls through the fingers of the wind,
Brandishing like a child, this disinherited magic
Thousands years of rectitude hover through the night
I have a perpendicular sword in my heart

Touched by blue
Drunk with poetry
my dreadfully crapulous hair hugging me from behind
Feet bare on a sheet of snow
I call to prayer for my masters
Murmurs in my ears, I lift my eyes and see the
Great Writers whose ink is thicker than blood
ghastly standing on their graves

Rilke proclaimed on his deathbed:
"Vergessen Sie nie, das Leben ist eine Herrlichkeit!" ("Never forget, life is a glory!")
Jiménez, Twain, Gary, Neruda, Yun ****-ju, Fitzgerald... all
look at me with compassionate gazes. And Braley grabs my face and yells,
"The greatest verse hasn't been written yet!"
Nazim Hikmet nodded
I hear a fading echo like receding waves,

Why be good?
It's probably all about
clothing our naked souls with
a dress of innocence.

Blood trails on the mossed Greek cheeks
The Memories' eternal catch but a wink in the cemeteries
My hands are made of spider webs,
Mine own heart, of shards
Fly, away they fly blue and white butterflies

A wine glass rolls in my hand, in my red lips.
Here stands Mona Lisa in my ethel funeral,
My abode so criminal: black leaves,
wrinkled lake, and dusted music box

A haunted castle in my spectral soul has
A marble floor extending its arms
To the mosaic of stained glass made
Of old apparitions

I, hopelessly romantic
Under the arch of an inscrutable moon gate
My clandestine tears on love letters
Stained with times and cherry wine

My rose is my wand so shy
Spellbound together like a parchment of decree
To the concaving world for a long farewell
Anonymous me! A man without pedigree

By the ruins of far nymphaeum, where
A garden of sculptures echoes underwater,
Where lost dwellers sleep of inarticulate tears,
I submerge like a goddess who lost her firstborn

On the cliffside where lobelia blooms
Wait I motionlessly amid the gyre of speeding seasons  
Hidden like burnt legends of gods
Like a page in the Library of Divine