gathered the storms,
and gathered the winds
of undying suffering.

sufferings of pleasure,
psychedelics of exalted warmth
stalked and stumbled
around the planetary man;
the dying and the undying
the man and the un-man

       both together excited to the darkest night.

who lost is unknown to me;
the wall blears the boundary.

unfixed the shape,
darkness deepens the dancing dolphins;
sanity swirls,
words skip the stray lips
as if forgotten bones collapse and crumble.

seaming with flabby fragments
the mouth of Thermopylae.
drawing a stick out of spillikins.

       there remains the tongue-tied taciturn;
       as if dead and done to bones.

New Year's Eve dark at 4:30,
a dilation like a pleasured eye:
stray clouds pull themselves
across the clarity

& stars smudge unreasonably
across taffy-thin years of light,
long inviting blears.
I am peeling away from myself,

half-drunk on the absence of grief,
half-drunk on my lovely neighbor's wine:
it's funny how little moments
can pull together the murmuration

into a pattern you can hold:
I feel possibilities, sour morsels
of old dreams going loose
into the frozen nacre of street,

into the cubic alleyways,
rain smiles light as *****.
But moments don't hold,
something turns off -

the clouds are burning alive
in a songbird's oubliette.
The bastille falls
all the prisoners escape.