(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

          I
     In a solitude of the sea
     Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

          II

     Steel chambers, late the pyres
     Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

          III

     Over the mirrors meant
     To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

          IV

     Jewels in joy designed
     To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

          V

     Dim moon-eyed fishes near
     Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”. . .

          VI

     Well: while was fashioning
     This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

          VII

     Prepared a sinister mate
     For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

          VIII

     And as the smart ship grew
     In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

          IX

     Alien they seemed to be:
     No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

          X

     Or sign that they were bent
     By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

          XI

     Till the Spinner of the Years
     Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

The owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo
From building and battered paving-stone.
The headlight scoffs at the mist,
And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;
Against a pane I press my forehead
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.

The headlight finds the way
And life is gone from the wet and the welter--
Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and bleared.
Far-wandered waif of other days,
Huddles for sleep in a doorway,
Homeless.

The blue honda pulls up to the curb. A strange lingering fog is tinged purple. He steps out of the car, and looks around. His phone buzzes in his pocket, but he ignores it in a moment of awe. What meets his bleared city eyes is a sight like no other. Looming in front of him is green woods, seemingly taking shallow breaths in the mist. Then, shadowy swirls form into tentacle-like wraiths. He stood frozen for what seemed like forever. Then a shadow slowly crawled onwards him, slithering on the gravel. It tentatively touches the tip of his shoe and he scrambles back into his car and locks the door, trying to steady himself. After telling himself repeatedly that it was just his imagination. Not real. Not real. Not real. Feeling better, he picks up his phone and calls his wife back. The phone rings, and the normal sound brings him back to the present. He looks towards the woods. He quietly scoffs to himself, what an idiot he was, it was only his imagination. Something catches his eye.He doesn’t see anything. Looking towards his phone something catches his eye again. Upon a second inspection he looks and finds nothing. He looks down on his phone, why can’t his wife pick up already? Something catches his eye a third time and he looks, there is no mistaking  the shadows leaking towards his car. he hangs up desperately and attempts to call again.It rings once and the shadows seem to leak into his car, it rings twice, and the shadows seep into the open window, it rings four times, and she finally picks up.
Her lone voice rings out
Hello?
…
Are you there?
…
Honey, are you ok?
...

When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with slanted eyebrows and stiff, silent upper lips. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we’d never really had to do the holding before and, as far as we knew, this is how men mourn.

We dusted antique left-behinds with delicate, moth-wing hands that fluttered here and there and never stopped trembling -- dead giveaways that within the corridors of our arms our heartbeats went stampeding, arrhythmic. We couldn’t quite bend them into the proper shape for prayer, so instead we ran them, with touch somewhere between float and feel, along every ashtray and age-stained picture album. In that moment I think we each wished that memory read like braille, but no one ever said as much. Because this is how men mourn.

We honored our patriarch with whiskey, hidden away for what must have been twice my age, between the carved out pages of old stacked books.
We drank like secrets. His portrait played witness.

We promised between our teeth with tinged lips tight, keeping words in that might otherwise crumble us like great ancient empires.

We singed and smoldered in a burn that coated our throats, quelling a choke that kept climbing its way up from a chest that never quite stayed sunk. Boys grow up loving the clinking twist of unlocking deadbolts but men peek through keyholes. Because this is how men mourn. Silent and straight with head only slightly slanted.

But when my father betrayed his rigidity with words that clicked clean like unfastening locks, we traded this stale air in for wind laced with the electric taste of thunderstorms. We forgot how men mourn.

When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with lightning behind bleared eyes. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we have umpteen days left to dress in bittersweet vestiges and, as far as we know, this is how men live on.

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.

Something black somewhere      in the vistas of his heart.

Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
&suffocation; called, dream-whiskey'd pour
sirening. Rosy there

too fly my Phil&Ellen; roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men&women; come&punt;
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it, from a flowerless land.
For timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind
my clock before I shave.

Soon it will fall dark. Soon you'll see stars
you fevered after, child, man, & did nothing -
compass love to the pencil-torch!
As still as his cadaver, Henry mars
this surface of an earth or other, feet south
eyes bleared west, waking to march.

from  *The Dream Songs

i remember going back to the now bleared moment, where it burgeons in
its ruinous hands. they demolished the hearth long ago and the dearth only fills
the air together with the splinters of what
was once yours — the wind is much tenser there, and there too is the bleak behemoth-shadow cast by the towering bell of the cathedral juxtaposed to the many a pompous mango tree enshrouding it like parasols to young, tender loam.
we were akin  to those moments of death,
lauded by the assuage of its avid fondness — when it has died, we can hardly tell that it were stripped out of life
and when it continued to live, we denied it
inside us that it was no more than an ephemera enjoyed. rain obscured the
dry land seeking till, and sooner than we
knew,
        the leaves have abandoned the trees
and we were underneath a shade of
       our own.

In a dead baby’s eyes,
    chest no longer heaves, throat no longer cries,
lies, dead, the choices of Humanity;
Individual choice or Social vanity.
And, either way, the way we go
leads us to and leads us fro.

When the last grave is filled;
When the last enemy lies killed;
When the last smoke from the last fire
rises up and up and yet no higher;
When the last tear is worthlessly shed;
When the last lament is sung for the dead;
When the valley of the shadow of death is no longer feared;
When evil and good disappear into the past, bleared;
Then and only then will time beat swords and plows to rust
and leave the stage clear for whomever must
stand triumphant, Adam and Eve, upon the stage
Humanity left in a silent and useless rage.
Lost, we did, the forest for the trees,
blind to what a dead baby sees . . .

Hi! And welcome to earth, me and you are gonna break a half a century old cycle together! I know you can do it, and I will do my best to buffer the waves of lies, manipulation and selfishness that has plagued a name nobody will say right
I will not be a bleared eyed, slurred shadow of your future, I will be loving and put you first, above my wants and my ideals
I will step back and allow you to learn and outsmart me one day
Love,
Your father and his scars

your half-smile
that slight pull at the corners of your mouth
the coiling of your lip into your cupid's bow
withdrawing from our kiss
the details of your face coming into focus as i move further away
your eyes lazily bleared, easily staring back at me.
there's a knowing nature about your expression,
that i can't play coy, can't play the game of teasing lovers
you know exactly where you stand, and i stand vulnerable.

was exhumed by stern-faced defeat
as all others revel in victories.
i only watch the limpid light
slowly frittering back to its
console as the barkeep hands me
my 7th beer of the night

as i handed them the first defense
of the inveigling tactic i have yet
to put them through and send their
young minds to equipoised trial.

i have felt ears poor without
understanding but the welcoming warmth of the light shone against
my already bleared body pierced
through the unclear of words,
as i read them littlest of
my far-slung poems, bardic
and resolute yet rogue upon sound
thinly hanging, barely on a spindle of plaudit.

the barkeep bestows me my 8th bottle and i have felt some
slow ease encroach me with lighter burnt retreat,
as i left,
unfinished.

Spritzed me with rain, this morning.
   Rooftops unravel inner coating like old scabs
   to wounds. Quiescent mercy of the Sun
   bleared behind curtains of cumulus. There is a far
   more in-depth correlation between an insurmountable
  ex-facto and the fruition of affront:
           something a sutured lip unwraps, a sotto voce.

                                                          ­    Murmuring murmurings,
       tousled the leaves to a zither like salad on a depthless bowl:
    a coarse susurrus unattainable through lip-reading: tongue’s the
   scythe and the message that rummages athwart, something
                                 that rushes in the blood, a scrape on the sinew
                 as I coil in pain like a thing in womb revealing its fetal nature.
                              something that speaks for another one – ventriloquism
                       in its keenest sense,        speak for me, you, both of us lost
                                in frenzied translation.

Creeping phlox blossoms, star-blanched,
crawl gently in choir in the thunder yard,
like soft fare for the silver river fee.

Linen immortelle, shadow-bleared,
knotted aegis against a raw, wracking world:
smeary cloth-stalks lengthen duskily.

Rain-pinked palm, sloe-blotched:
tawny token of revival from those
who idle beneath rude thunderheads.

if i were to get old
and lose my train of thought
if i were to grow cold
with every single soul

if my blue eyes bleared
not knowing what they see
would you kindly hold my hand
while you sit beside of me
and show me sympathy

if i become argumentative
with all life throws my way
if i really meant it
but not in the way i say

if this dreaded day deeds
to play my life for keeps
would you kindly hold my hand
while you sit beside of me
and lovingly comfort me

if i continually see things
that are not really there
if i sit in silence
and at the walls i stare

if i am but a shell
of who i used to be
would you kindly hold my hand
while you sit beside of me
to have, to hold, to keep