SWEET ILLUSION

Not to rupture the seam:  in the long din of locking skulls,
appeals to the deaf are the bones of soliloquy.

Then like ooze they descend, rejoicing again!
The wise in their easy faith, their docile drift,
their wholesome lies. By what strength do I,
least pious of men, ascend these dim flights of reason:
Never bending, still I thirst;
this mortal rail both crutch and curse.
Such a stubborn ***…their cult of light would be mine—
had not that wasting disease, that mad desire to know,
been spawned in childhood, grown fat on my naivete…
had not that grim ogre Truth won possession of my mind.
I was young and strong and foolish.
I held a restless plum in granite,
ripe for any man with nerve enough
to worship sense over myth.
Their hallowed ruse is still beneath me.
But I’m older now, and bound by time
to grip the rail, to check my climb:
each step an hour, each day a tier—
ah, to pause, to kneel,
to part with my dignity here.
Up once more.
And who am I to think I’ll find
the answers I’ve been living for.
Let me hold my peace, never lose my grip.
Let me hang on till my senses slip.
Let me close to mind each skeptic’s call
as death takes wing to break his fall:
Don’t leave me, dear God, not again!
Catch me lest my life should end.

Worm

As this fever is groomed for the grave,
it weathers the lash of time.
Though lamb is the morsel you crave,
your sheep perseveres into prime.
You will have your prize,
but while I seethe…this mind is mine!
I’ll not be swayed by a crude, transparent suggestion.
I’ll bind my eyes, deny I see
that gleam, that sweet illusion,
grown bold, seducing me.
I’ll right my spine, I’ll lock my knees,
I’ll cast this trembling life aloft,
in offer to a breeze,
never knowing whence it rose,
nor ever where it flees.

**** you!

Each riddle answered begets another riddle!
Each vagabond, protean solution
is but a fragment of the boundless puzzle.
While I have strength let me learn.
Let me juxtapose, let me correlate the pieces.
Let me vow to expose you,
to hound you till I pin you down;
to rave the melancholy deep,
while sane enough to see
that I’m older now, and due in time,
to doubt my mind, to sense that I’m
nearly where you want me.

Beyond this feeble glow, all is certainly darkness.
Yet the wise speak of a further life, of a will to come.
They whimper when prodded; dogs drugged by a dream—
their gilt Dove a bauble—like children,
they are hypnotized by the gleam.
I can see it in their eyes.
And to pause here I can almost see
an endless night embracing me.

Listen! There is mirth at the threshold,
a perverse kind of pride.
Hypocrites! Echolalics! Somniloquists all!
Mother Reason, make them cease!
I know now it is wrong to be right:
I am lone, and ever colder. You thief!
Why did you banish my feet from their dance.
Why must my heart want to mangle the rhyme.
If I were a wiser man, I would plunge into Light.
Yet I set my teeth and climb. Come worm,
be swift; there are shimmers in the dusk,
and I’m older.

Take these eyes
that I may not be dazzled by lies any longer.
Break this hold, that I might extrapolate,
die born, and in my hour dare to face you:
To brave the night, to leap the rail,
to lift that last forbidden veil,
and make this coward see.
To fall, to grasp the loom of time,
to lose my mind, to sense that I’m
nearly where you want me.

THE BIG WHEEL

Stop! Think.

IN INFINITY EVERYTHING REDUCES TO NOTHING:
The heavens a mist, your God a blip,
all existence a freak of light and shadow.
Nothing is punier than arrogance.

This is a clockwork universe. Yet it has no Mainspring,
measures only instantaneousness in perpetuity.
Providence or circumstance—can all this radiance, receding,
simply vanish into nought…
The big wheel turns the lesser wheels;
the lesser wheels, the stars.
The stars roll round those starving hearts
their greater wheels have wrought.

Galaxies fling their bristles wide,
spattering flame on a canvas boundless, artless,
imponderable. Within these wheels a prodigy quests,
spinning in pitch and timelessness,
forever falling round a warm mother sun.

My world is staggeringly beautiful.

In evening she murmurs, post-mourning she sings.
Her heart is all creation, her hearth a planet wide.
Each tremor of birthing, each strumming of wings,
aches to the rhythms of season and tide:  leaves follow sun,
winds scatter rain. Streams rush to bed, to the lullaby of sea.
You blood or brine or fluke or fate—
Is this one sweet fire just one more torch in passing.
The heavens yawn above us, the clockwork shrinks below…
in molecules are…galaxies becoming…
greater, lesser, up and down:  all things bend to math and mind.
Yet,
in Infinity,
Everything adds up to—

NOTHING!

Chimeras breed in peepholes,
where tiny wheels are wrought.
These wee wheels spin their smaller wheels;
the smaller wheels, the jots.
The jots chum from the mocking depths,
and vanish into nought…

A SOLSTICE SONG

O my Sol—in my one and humble stand,
no finer hand has played my body than thine.
No other could be so catholic in giving,
so regal in simplicity, so munificent in nurture.

Humility, endow me. Smooth your alien salve
on the grieving house of man. Bleed we outrageous souls
who long for neither left nor right, but to balance both extremes.
Ego, release me. Spare your hobbled prey
the clearer sense to disregard the senses.
Thy highest aspiration is solely Self:  the ignominious ****
of all that garners, squirms, or gleams.
Vengeance, survive me. Butcher without qualm
that naked beast who squanders ****** eyes,
who wanders mist to shadow, pincers poised,
throughout the heaving veils and ****** truths
our minds construe as dreams.

O my Sol—cauldron of the heavens, shepherd of my eye,
muse to mark that cherished pulse that resurrects my spine—

Condemn to thine inferno all who desecrate this well!
**** into thy leaping flares each poison man has sown:

Burn out this stone!

O my Sol—lure of my vein, lamb in my wound,
cure to treat my fleet and tender vine;
for this gift of life I thank thee twice:  
once, when first I held thy goodly eye,
once again, with tinder, when I die.





Copyright 2019
contact Ron Sanders at:

ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

I WALK ALONE

When streets are dead, when liquid lies have dried,
sifting shadows stitch a billion puppets’ eyes.
Mucus, in threads, is sewn into hide…
skin marries skin till the fresh puppets rise.
Out of my bed…man, out of my mind!
I slide into midnight—from sleep’s tether torn—
the world to disdain, the hillsides to roam.
Sidewalks are idle, the storefronts all blind.
But there…and there…are life’s bleak reminders…there!
Fleeing from footfalls, the ******* lowborn
scatter like rats under neon and chrome.

Then here…and…here:  Where lamps are no longer,
the black bushes rear. Creepers emerge, in moonlight surreal.
Shrubs break from soil. The foliage draws near,
longing to lean on my lean denim foil. Sampling, saving,
the branches converge:  leaf learning flesh,
thorn tracing wheal. Tendrils, recoiling, in one motion merge.
So real they feel…in ghastly waves they ache my way,
reeking sweet patchouli, seaming scrub and sky.
Merely dreams…clearly dreams are they!
Rounding my limbs, reaching my heart,
they tremble, start, surrender and die.
High overhead, a lone rider wheels;
her mask, like mine, the pallor of bone.
No path, no pale…no surface have I—
none beyond the fog that chides
the chatter of my heels. The canopy reels
where I walk alone.

Slay me where the sunlight bleeds, burn me where she dies. Turn my bones in hallowed hearths, where horror’s hand recedes.

Day is remade:
No one sees her flames run like beetles,
dashing rock to rock, crafting soot of hemoglobin.

Day is unmade:
No one hears her screams
take the elders in their dreams,
and none can know her timeworn scheme
of roaches, flies, and lullabies,
of pointless babies primed and plumped
on useless prayers and curdled cream.

Written as fools were we, from the moment our coding
was spat from the sea. Targets and tools, contused and confused—
bungling, begging, bumbling ******* all;
ridden like mules, abused till we fall.
Off in the dimness, the dark curtains part.
A rider appears, his steed mailed in stone.
No cross, no creed…no ballast have I—
none beyond the emptiness
that weighs upon my heart. The deep shadows start
where I walk alone.





Copyright 2019
contact Ron Sanders at:

ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

SAGA OF THE SNAIL

I dreamed I was in your dream.

Your lids were drawn, my blood was all but steaming.
Your glass was fogged, your censers veiled,
but were you really dreaming.
If motes could scream!
—Had the moon betrayed your slivered eyes with gleaming!
My wings were moored, my panes opaque,
but was I truly dreaming.

As moonlight ran from chalk to bone, and shadows ash to coal,
I prayed my pulse would soften lest the silence read my soul.

But I swear…if I touch you there…
if I peel down the sheet, as gently as I can,
would you comprehend the lash, in your web so soft and sweet—
how could you understand—what it means to be a man.

Dream never end! Dream never die!
Propriety be ******. A brute in pain am I.

I’ve sullied thee! Forgive me, sweet, gentle Frances.
Share the warmth you radiate, the glow that it enhances.
We can take our chances.

How fully you have blossomed, how lovely you have grown.
With grains of sand the gods have cast a semiprecious stone,
secretly. They whisper you were made for me; sweetly, gently—
then boot me out of bed to spend another day alone.

O mea! A feebly pacing castaway, I watch your lines drift by.
My body howls the night away, succumbing with a sigh.
My mind retreats in slumber, pursuing you and I.
But my dream is one day older, and Frances, so am I.

I have lived this dream, have loved this lie,
was born that you might see
that Frances, when I die,
your love a cradle be.

WHILE THE DRAGON SLEEPS

Now the long drive is over. The summit is ours.
Below, a harlequin sprawl marks the sweet spread of home.
This is equipoise:  snuggled, facing, in Mulholland’s arms.
I can melt in her eyes, and she in mine. And,
though lovers be children, the darkness, the silence
are benign. Magicians, we vanish in blankets and springs.
The wheels are aligned. Gears mesh and grind.
Perfume, colluding, allies with the musk of cologne—
thrilling the senses, filling the cab, till only the vista breathes.
Time heaves. The basin sighs, settles.

In the pale of the moon, the city at night is a great, sleeping beast.
The red jewels of taillights are glimmers in his dream.

Ah, sentience…behind the wheel I have wings!
My course is the broken line. In my arm I have one
whose wings have been pinned. Like moths to flame we fly.
Light boggles, light binds, light beckons from lampposts
where bright sentries swing their globes past the windshield
like pearls on a string. Hush—she is sleeping;
her breathing a drug, a soft, seductive song.
Each breath is in rhyme, is in time with the rhythm
of traffic like passing sighs.
The signals have fetched us home,
dead on the beat of the dragon’s pulse.

Budding gods are we all, in the splendor of our kind;
our very eyes are stars, our minds are rapt with light.
In this luster we emerge to leave our legacy behind.
The chrysalis is shed:  a butterfly takes wing
while the dragon sleeps tonight.

ASCENT

In azure and cream the days bleed to gray.
Life bursts upon life:  grace splashes in wood,
jewels tremble in brine, shadows embark on the wind.
We are woven in time—
as we harvest and sow, so we slumber and rise.
Night begets day as the sleeper dreams his eyes.
The light is on, the light is off.

It is the great dissolution that gives us mountains,
the sweet swindle of hope that makes magic almost tangible.
Man rails against reason:  now drunk with indignation,
now numb with grief and bile, he mulls over ashes,
dabbles in phantoms, transmogrifies truths.
The light is on, the light is off.

His is a legacy of fire.
He is raptor, he is despot, he is hero nonetheless.
And one day he will master his blood.

Somehow this scoundrel, this seer,
this passionate beast who scraped his way
from stone to steel, will bear his pain with courage,
find his peace in forgiveness,
and rear his young with imagination

The light is on.