I loved the bitter taste,​​​​​​​
I miss the dusty air I breathed.
But time has come to give that up,
To let go of my chemical scars.
I will bandage myself up,
Repair my lonely heart,
And leave my old life of war,
For a calmer future.

I made my mistakes,
But my mistakes have not won.
My blood will never be pure,
But the evil has been killed.

Dear Pablo, as I look over
my soaking body, wet, with patches
of dirt, blotched and raw bleeding,
the clouds turn in my yellowed eyes
in order to love you, my Pablo.  
You, who made me feel radiant.  
As I am the sea,  I fish for you,
rolling in mud, and becoming
mountain, I topple for your toes
who'd dig in deep and itch my aching

breast to sleep.  My dreamful-drowsy
birds, rake the skies, rush-out like nets
wanting you on their wings, my poem.
Pablo, I loved you so when you said,
my flowers were little stars to pick,
and that loneliness was a train who waits
in a far-away station, and how, my most
minuscule attributes — a cat, a pear,
the atom, you praised, in odes, heaped
like showers hailed from heaven, as fresh-

water you reigned from the other side
of tears, and temper'd my salt, my green,
murky life.  Dearest Pablo, since you've gone,
my breath has the emptiness that hides under
stone.  And the blue-winds crossing, my life-
less age, they are nothing but long waves,
keening,   —  Nay   —  rood   —   ahhh!
Since you have left me.  And my trees,
they forget how to grow,
my song, my only,
Pablo.

We trod in steps without spark,
A careful journey one remakes,
With days of dreams' surrender,
O love— is but a promised land.

In our youth precious time reigns
And greetings are met with sorrow,
Maidens and lads, each entertains
Graces above us, Venus and Apollo,                                                          ­            

Gods on high, who told us stories,
Of the cloud nursery, of mountains
Keep and comings of celestial glory,
Not of gentle caress to windy hands,

Of shy indifferences, the trials of lot,
Nor the endless engulf, still desires,
In this land of lost, unmoving gusts,
Go those who shuffle— souls entire.

Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

The first ones they killed were the poets.
They crowned themselves, the sterile
And sexless acorns who fell from the felled
And split the air, writing with bark,
Would have us not desire experience
But describing trees.  To the naked kings
The word is a wonder, a tool to be used
Like any other.  With a forge, they called
An altar, they pitted heaven and made miners
Of the Gods.  In high places they read
Their grounded works, sogged with rain
Water from a red wheelbarrow, they list
And bludgeon us with their hammered similes,
Scribe their poems, they are the painters of one
Colour and high priests of alchemy, turning
Salon into echelon.  When the falcon stoops
They name him hawk.  Standing ****, flat-footed,
In bumpy skin, their honks go unanswered,
For they are no kin to the swan that glides
And sometimes they remember that,

The first ones they killed were the poets,
When the sky is etherized, prose made
Verse and their subjects yawn the great
Slaving maw.  Steeped in stale erudition,
They man-scaped the garden, pulled out
The weeds and by their words, they decreed
That only grass should grow, in strident
Chorus they are ringing in the sheaves.
But their poems are only like poems.
The naked kings are clothed in word only.

In the thirsty kingdom, water spills
Stagnant from the stein and the droplets
Echo, "there's no there  .  .  . there."
Incestuously they christened
Each other, one hundred years of virgins
Making love with a dead word
They know not of— Poet!  Asters
Among the daisies, yet on the fields
Of praise, they shall deflower
Themselves and though they strut
And prance as stallions and mares,
You will know them by their brays.

Blue veins that pace from on high
Or saunter, streaming in a drowsy
Way, day napping light into ocean
Sleep, carousing with slides of time
And dearest travelers to keep—
Where do you come from?
What is your source, a holy well
Or mountain tarn, the fallen cloud,
The rising waters that bursting sun
So ordains, what the wistful, traveling
Birds are want to herald by all thy names
As they speak from above on spry wings?
In my final day shall I know such peace
That your drifting lay delivers?  Or shall
The moon unface me as I dive into
Lost cloaks of the eternal oceans?
River, my final driver, take me on
Those pathways to the seas,
With open eyes welcoming
Under the lacing lakes,
Of greatest garment,
The bedding nights
Of gentle stars.

Oh Lord, why have you taken my happiness from me?
It was needed, important, oh why can't you see?
The smiles, the laughter, the woes and woe-nots,
Weren't all taken stride, more often than aught.

With its life you took mine, it is sad but it is true.
The time we had was far from few,
My pride and joy was in the womb,
But oh dear death, your sadness loomed.

I understand why your time was short,
You were needed somewhere, a high court.
Oh child of mine who'd never see day
I know I couldn't have asked you to stay.

The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.

Love’s progress does not wait
For Elegies or romantic verse
The right true end of love is
Carried over, in the next generation

For how long, whose to say?
Until our children are born immortal
Until our machines talk back to us?
By our new nature, from planets

Harvesting stars, equally at peace
Love’s progress no longer rests
In the story between a ‘you and I’
Love is a thing for society

To share like virtue, soft and free
Perfection to unite, and value more
Than gold, more than wealthy
Or any physical kind of security

Although we see the celestial bodies move
Love and time have their own marriage
These swelling lips that sing of passion
And these serene hearts that dance
For a brief lifetime, that went too fast?