Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.

Greece burned its sins in the days of Rome,
City of wrinkled roads like the crushed pillow
From a sleeping lover who left long ago.  
The sea tends to its wool-gathering of sands.

The dead lie like Rome,
Like toppled sunshine in stone,
From a boy who had blown
Into the seashell of the Forum,
Heard back in restoning, the alley of home,
The narrow, basket-flowered angiportum…
But, lips too strong, let out unknown
The stone-witherings of Medusa
And the bone dust of empire.

Standing upon these novel halls
The man, waiting
Seeks temperance and a kindness from God

He says,

"Give to me the gift of your knowledge and I will smite your enemy--rebuild the garden and replace those fruits long lost"

And his request echoes impotent through a voiceless hall

He cries, wails, churns and smashes
his dirtied knuckles on the walls

He yells, buckles, whines and sputters
Choked and lost in miserable,

The flanking rooms locked and dark
With constant voicing, gently call

"Who upon ye has the gall,
to name me Father"

And he is quiet.

------

In Moscow the Siberian fall grips the air
A wandering Dostoyevsky speaks in exhalations to the crack of gunshot in the dawn

A brief tightening of callous rope around his dry poetic throat

And at once his words sought to cull
the exquisite embers of furious retort

And he is silent.

----

The kindness of a failing city-state
Conveyed on the precipice of a bay
Jack teethed his frantic dharmas
And said to Them,

"What terminus of road
Would ever serve my unwinding soul?"

And as his gut trembled a final thought,
His eyes turned skyward, above the clouds

Where it was silent.

----

Dorigen, repenting the patient shores of tranquil sea
Accusing the chalk of its blackened soul
Traces the subtle dance of gulls
As their drowning feathers face these ageless things
whysper'd deep upon the winds

And she is Silent.

---

Basho, with a wanderer's grin
In solumn steps between the grains
Shades the path of unfamiliar road
And every poem steeped within

Where clouds are soft, where crickets sing
Past warbling stream with cadence grim
The Dao, leading ever onward

Says to him,

"Like water, do I rain."

---

Milton, his misted eyes
No light to guide their failed sight
Trace an ancient knowing glance
To Crown, his subtle circumstance

No soul in life
could see the might
Who gave this man his funeral rites

And when his words fall deaf at last
On his forgotten time and wishful past

He will stare deep into an inky void
And see
The stars for what they are:

Light, dispersed between the dark.

---

In the waning tide of Cresent lune
Twilight casts a gentle hue
Below the hill the city glows
The Palatine, gold and new

The ides, with consequence they come
And with them carry the will be done
Augustus' silent retinue of one
Notes a sky of draining sun

For Rome claws at all of Gaia's *******
And from sea to mount and desert dune
Ancient Africa, nascent Gaul
To Rome, will they forever fall

In darkness, the Palatine shadow loomed
Over web of flame-lit avenue

For the roads all led to Rome that night
For one small moment God guessed right

Cesar's legions on the fields of Mars
Clashed swords and drank to their Centurions
As an Era waited to see the dawn
And new blood to baptize the marbled Columns

And in the farms
beyond Rome,
The shepherds walked their sheep to rest
Where families returned to their homes
With stories of the day's parades and jests

And in the time
Between the days
When Rome slept and the crickets mated
The world was cast in velvet night
Lighted solely by constellation

And in that moment
God became
silent.
---

Venezia, its musical key of brick and shade
And the canals in rejoining polyphony
Sweeten the dour Church-ear.  
From the impasto knife and loose brushwork,
A thumb-smear of waves and gently-bristled strife
Rise to assumption of the cloud-submerged bay,
Mural of cristallo, only-light without landscape,
Made too from the winds of Murano,
Its clayed blowpipe of waterways molding
The lagoon of blown glass and bouquet of colored sea-shadows.

The Tiber lies on its side, like the lion and fox,
Licking its paws at empire’s dust,
A drifting gaze of water that already foresees
The swift-run northward to Romagna,
Where the veined fur of the roe will succumb…
A ripple twitches like one dark claw of the Borgia…

The watercolors of the Arno are a fresco
On the wet plaster of the lips of Firenze, Tuscan fire-dream.
Or like the warring leg in curve of counterpoise,
Sprung foot-forward to the daring world
And arm slung down in stone-victory
From this valley, too much like Elah,
With taunting eyes turned from the Medici toward Rome.

i didn't want to paint i just wanted to be great at something so i unghosted my soul, told her to go pick 6 roses out of the garden of my love for the mountains & i pierced my nose w a silver needle that was so sharp i could hear your velvet voice again & it call came back to me in little waves of blue pain and sunflower energy on lined sheets of paper sort of like this one with an orange accent I had to find in Rome behind motorcycles & burnt coffee w out the bitter memory of sugar cookies, only the ones we ate on long weekends by the beach beside the ways in which the sun told us the stories of sunken ships & waves the moon wanted to create at 2:11am on the least windiest days. i didnt bring my brushes w me, but a skateboard and a glass house were enough for a disappearing act & 3 conversations w a wall and spray paint can