you take the fall’s seriousness
         like you were a leaf from the bough
of this tree called love –

     as you were nearer to me than any other
light with its hands clasped, starting rivers in me;

   you, whose mouth benignly twitch to utter
such glibness that even the stinging fragrance
of newness sings in me

the darkness swallowed slovenly as if all of the world
swims past the squalor of my blood – new to old wholeness
bones to a gleam of washlines,

       wherefore there is nothing left to guess
in such hypothetical kisses when you looked at me
with two strutting cities for eyes that
churn to fade out such articulation of sibilance –

     it is like this is never a better fate than plunging,
the moon between the hill and my body
    within your body.

each time the wind turns the pages
of the tree, the sun ripens in itself,
a fruit transfixing the day—

we take it in our hands,
lowly in the grass we lay in slender
fascination, a fresh fruit's glaze
signaling the hour.

this is when my love heightens
as rain falls inanimately on unquiet stones, revealing their naked splendor.
their silences transmuted into undressed
woes of women toiling shorelines and men striding subterranean worlds —

whereas when brightness then quells
itself and tosses you out into the deepest
chasm of chores, your locomotives unction you my sweet lovingly arms
where i bring you close to rescue,

herein darkness prevails and overthrows
water: my hands divest their fates and begin to scour for the nacre of your heart—
and i will take it, and i will own it,
  for there is nothing the blue yields in depth but the lesson it shares,

leaving me a place, flat on my belly,
  with a bounty of flowers in my mouth
your lips have planted like your hand
     on my chest.

an ant fell in between the page
   of the book,

even its own silence it does not understand.
from where to climb it does not know,
all steps carve discourse;

staggering in its littleness, its fragile
  mind takes on the mystery of star
and its delicate body swells in the sheen
   of words.

as in the night, it trails the moon's slender stem that transfixes
   a constellation's ephemerality:
a soldier tumbled over, undulant,
  amazed in betweenness of light
and dark when god himself dies
   before his fall was born,

o trencherman, deep in the peril
  of a word's closing, fusion of
knowledge's breakwater and permutations of bluntness,

the unwelcoming abyss is your kingdom,
  unwillingly enduring the taut blow
    without purpose — when the book is shut, to what dark do you imagine your
  eyes? to what enigma does your senses
wake up to? and to what erudition does
   your silence keep flowering?

an ant fell into the book, and in its turning page, it rides each changing wave like
  the white in its pale, blue horse,

arriving at different shores, yet all the same, a notable fate: stilled and dizzy
washed and unmoving in the abject night.

because love when cut,
lets loose
an empire of blood:

i have in my lips,
a treaty of oblivion—
releasing an embittered lemon.

in the throne of the sea,
waves repeat the crash
of perfidy.
by the mountains they ride,
the thick air of strobe.

rocks receive the genital fire
of lighthouses
exposing intones of shadow
one by one.

the beast maimed
behind the zither of trees
makes no sound like
  an aleph.

i herald the collusion of night
   and children
and weep at the solicitude of mothers,

because pines swoon in the dark
and with its hand, the gentlest war
   threshes the flesh and blood,
raining on us forever.

hostile eyes bypass the silence of things
  and lovers closing doors repeatedly,
disrupting the vale from its slumber.

   it is because when love is let loose,
it releases both of us — weary, inescapably ripe with the wind, looking
   for each other as doves do in flight,
  separate and obscured, opening gates;

                                           nightfall:
   the savage aroma of wood
       on the leaves that sway fervently
          tippling away from boughs.

i fear whose hearth
tongues a whetted fire of dream:

i believe dreams no longer

because dreams smith an immense, black
bell which mine cathedral cannot hold,

because it births an artichoke
strangled by seaweed.

it is because its friction, an allegorical hand denies skin, carries in it an origami
of shrubs and dense fires which smoke
chokes my lost heart.

it is because its machine that never sleeps toils all morning, making the evenings full and tender with scorned
sound of gnashing gear-work, sending
me to unsettled sleep;

it is because i wake where windows
are opened and only the wind touches
my cumbersome body,

it is because dreams slender like wheat
grow molds when striding past waters
takes too long for me to reach
your portico where you wait for me.

it is because i walk past ignominious streets palpable with the disgrace
of the crowds that contain no faces.
it is because when my eyes are lightsome,
such image blurs and i cannot paint it,
and when they close, departures start
bells in my heart.

it is because dream is a flowering
and sleep has no use of its senseless
crown of knives, and i, like a child
yearning for a mother, ambles slowly
in fascination of a hurt underneath the throb of an old moon's wane.

it is because when i am next to you,
i am stiff with the rigor of sleep's pallor
and in the headiness of my dreaming of you, i cannot move to even summon
the brash locomotive of the train

which stops a sudden when i am
a few steps near you.

verily this evening, from the veranda
i smell the fragrance of their arrivals.

the tall, slender, stockinged women
swaying like bamboo in the wind.

the admirals in white commandeering
vessels — the shear of wind, a tractable beast.

the ploys of men to woo the darling,
  the hesitations of dames cloaked
in obvious handiwork of skirts.

they slalom through life's rugged streets
like blueprints of doors revealing
  benign propaganda.

it is all too real to me. i have lived
behind the shadow of words.

it is all that i am cut up for — doting on
it still, yet a nonexistent blossom.

hearing them leave the interior of walls,
soldering the notoriety of burdens.
witnesses drowned in water,
their muffled voices reinvent the quietude. there is a dailiness overmastered by them, such rampant
mendaciloquence denied by me.

i move past cataracts of crowds
and hunt for the silence: this importunate need that feeds my bloodthirsty being.
i awaken the sleeping prowess
of words and listen to them.

now, leave me with my ocean.
i was meant to ***** in the blue
and froth like the last of unburied water,
  dreaming of fish.

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.