You were draped across a girlfriend's bedroom wall
where a cross would be,
your arms held out loosely like an ambiguous invitation,
shielding your countenance from extraneous intrusions
under which she would sleep soundly
in the shroud of your incantation.

Your fallen angel wings beating back bad dreams
slain mercilessly
and falling at your feet.

Your lips slightly pouting, eyes dark,
obfuscating the madness and ***-crazed hallucinations
they harbor.

Hair purposefully unkempt,
disheveled sensuously atop your head,
tufts of hair brushed across your broad chest--

Bare muscles taut and taunting,
placed topographically on the poised temple--
those ready to worship bow their heads
in reverence to the sonic alchemist.

The modern adonis,
sculpted out of the Mississippi Delta Blues
and Dionysian wet dreams--
brought to life with the electric current pulsating through the microphone and its stand upon which you straddle with skin-tight leather pants--

Your left hand around its waist,
your right cupped over the phallus--
your lips part and your cataclysmal eyes
envelop the darkness before you--

Your image,
tormented and tantalizing
in an open invitation
to prostrate ourselves before you
and succumb to your hypnotic stare.

The door opens.

Smoke scintillated by ***** lights
Scent of cheap beer and cigarettes
Arms and legs and heads and butts
                mashed
      mangled
            mingling

In a space ejecting bravado
responding to the auricular bludgeons
plucking veins and boiling blood
arms and legs flailing like spiders
hammered by raindrops

Calloused voices scream through feedback
eking out of anguished amplifiers
while jungle drums synchronize hearts
to their frantic pulse

New friends old friends celebration
in sweaty embraces chanting screaming
stumbling outside the gates of eternity
sidewalk where we gathered round the sordid soapbox
and cast beleaguering gargantuan buildings
and endless cataclysmal streets
into abeyance

to prance along these old sidewalk cracks
stumbling along cigarette butts and beer cans
efflorescing under amative neon lights whose bombinate glow
tingles our skin and dazzles our eyeballs
rolling back into our skulls in the wake of ecstasy
billowing over our ambulant bodies

Friday nights
     Saturday nights
              Sunday nights
skipping school on a week day
braving city night life to find us in the nooks
they forgot to sweep out
where trash collects and pretends
to be unwavering and implacable
for a moment

Til it's back on the streets we spill out upon like puke
like the beer sticking to checkerboard floors
and we float home on the feedback high singing in our ears to sleep
dreaming of these ecstasies as something perennial
in punk lover's dreams

Pure when we're filthy.

I again glimpse of eternity.

I saunter where the shadows stain the streets.
I linger where my essence is silhouetted in the moonlight,
or beamed under a street light,
                                               or doused in headlights.

I loiter with friends in parking lots of frozen yogurt shops
in a small town--
listing torpid quadrupeds,
whose shells glisten and dazzle in the myriad of lights,
scrolling down the boulevard.

I find myself behind the wheel,
grazing among pavement pastures,
hungrily consuming the open road
on a silent night,                         in the still air.

          Night makes everything seem to go on forever.

From the speakers I hear the sizzle of ancient synthesizers
envelop the interjections of pulsating snare drum
slaps and snaps, cracks and claps.
          Hypnotized, I hit cruise control and drift ceaselessly.

At home, face illuminated in the television's glare,
my body buried under the weight of scattered sheets,
staggering dreams, snacks and drinks,
          my eyes burn steady into the void.

The television, likewise, burns into me,
as I ingest films that depict time travel in all its ambiguity.
I rip through the portal, feeling simultaneously
expeditious and sluggish.
          Did I stop time with breakneck speed,
or did I freeze like a river in the winter solstice?

Either way, I now stand outside the confines of mortality.

There's the sands of perception (identity)
muddied by the breaking waves of time,
where my sunken footprints
appear
and
disappear.

Relinquishing the captain's chair,
my mind fills with lucid dreams,
          from the TV screen.
Surely I know this is not reality,
but I cannot help it--
I am an accomplice in these chronographic schemes.

Though I appear in control, or at least aware,
I surrender my earthly duties to the conductor of time,
or its deviant: The Vexer.

The Vexer, the mischievous time traveler,
who dances between the dimensions,
with black holes for ears,
the speed of sound for a voice,
the speed of light for eyes--
it is the pestering worm digging throughout the galactic space apple.

The Vexer, who has wrenched me from my mortal footing,
to cast me adrift among uncharted seas,
with gloomy waters murky but heavenly
in its dark and rich violet glow,
like fires that burn hot hot on the color spectrum.
          A color less seen and therefore depicted as serene,
but all the more potent in its mystery.

The Vexer, with a wink of its cataclysmal eye,
grabs me by the wrist and tears me across the night sky--
I stretch thin between the television lines,
the endless roads and the mystic synthesizers,
peering through the night sky,
where human senses dull and the mind wanders--
          I have found myself in the Twilight Zone.

I am bound for eternity, ****** through the
tunnel vision telescope of man,
refracted as I bounce among the mirrors within,
expounded among the stars and the space between,
exploding in a brilliance in the vastness of its bliss.

The youthful laughter that ejects from the parking lots
of frozen yogurt shops,
the night drives with eyes that gloss over as it peers into oblivion,
dulled human senses that leave room for the mind to ponder,
the television screen that burns steadily into the mind,
the Vexer who oversees the mind's pondering of night life,
who like the court's jongleur skips and leaps
around the immensity of time's preponderance--  

Feigning insomnia to reap the benefits of illumination
in the infinitesimal night hour,
in these lingering hours that warp around somber hands
frozen on the midnight clock,
where thoughts of poetry flow and still bodies collect dew,
          the proximity of night life as it pertains to time travel:

The two are entwined.

As a leaf departs from a twig which dears her true
And which on his care and ardor adamant
So acquiescent and frail you depart too
With the swift wind you became compliant
Then, ceiling became my kind of sky
But bare and dull contrast to that azure canopy placed high
Bed is now my kind of meadow green and dazzling
But damp not of dew but of my tears overflowing
My breath turned into a summer zephyr
Warm and gentle, repose to my fear
My tears grew into an ocean abysmal
Immeasurable with ripples cataclysmal.