"delirium" poems
Kashmir Delirium
Oh People Of Earth! Thankful are we,
For each act of benevolence shown to us.
Your gilded sweet words describing,
The beauty of Kasmir, land and people.
Mention in books and talks of it's riches,
Naming it the Sweet Paradise Of Earth.
The Lord has been bountiful to Kashmir,
Treasure of resources in every sphere.
To elevate each aspect, our wish for life,
As every acre of this land is worth millions.
Full of treasures and recreational value,
Forestry with grandeur and silvery rivers.
The outside world's view is so limited,
Simple folks living in the lap of rich bounty.
Mentioned in world forums and organizations,
But what of the goal of giving us freedom?
What has The UN established in our name?
To measure the pain and anguish we bear,
At the hands, of our supposed benefactors.
The saviours who has us fractured.
But in reality they train their enforcers,
In the art of creating oceans of tears.
The red blood now hidden in camouflage,
The spent shells now gathered and hidden.
The leaders we are told to elect in electoral shams,
Run publicity kiosks and swell friend lists.
Joint conferences to address personal interests
Dialogues that never address the root issues.
Just the formalities and no sympathy,
For the ones burnt in cruel sadistic reprisals.
The hypocrisy continues deliriously unabated,
More augmentation of the security forces.
For a first hand view of deep hypocrisy,
Walk this land, you know as beautiful.
Religious leaders will teach you political artistry,
Sermons full of ambiguity and guile.
Waywardness and narrow mindedness on display,
Political apologists give great lessons.
Religion and religious ethnicity are tools,
That keep minds and bodies in total check.
Gamesmanship by leaders is the rule of thumb,
As promises are forgotten once office is obtained.
When writing of this succulent beautiful land,
Write of the air, pregnant with sadistic practices.
This land is being stripped of worldly treasures,
And the greatest treasure is mistreated daily.
The best of nation is the inhabitants,
Ignored are the real gems of this beautiful paradise.
Dec 29, 2015
Dec 29, 2015 at 6:44 AM UTC
I got some things I want to confess
From an awkward nerd to a beautiful countess
You're more confusing than the Higg's Boson
I understand more the positrons and electrons
You're more complex than a polysaccharide
"Understanding You" is no book my archive
Why can't our relationship be a mutualism
Rather than the one sided commensalism
Could we be close like the tibia and fibula?
So close like the aorta and vena cavas?
To be close, I could only hope
Like uranium 237 and uranium 238, inseparable isotopes
Whenever I see you, I get the "kilig" affixes
Like the sour taste of citru sinensis
I can't get enough of your wonderful smile
It's like the taste of pentahydroxyhexanal
You might think I'm in delirium
But my thoughts are in equilibrium
You're the only girl inside my cranium
And this love for you is more precious than titanium
May 28, 2015
May 28, 2015 at 6:57 AM UTC
Oh delirium, how much I have grown in-love with thee at this hour near morning twilight all hazy in the brain in deciding whether to see you or to drop my head asleep, accustomed to the bewitching time and longing to see that lingering daylight break, a dreamy state of thus, this moment wondering...
Apr 28, 2013
Apr 28, 2013 at 5:28 PM UTC
First came the false presumptions of luxury
The gaudy glamour
Bright dresses and dark suits
Awkward glances and ****** food
Eventually though
The evening settled down
And then, after the smoking and drinking
Came 1 o'clock, the worn-out end of a hazy day
Suddenly,
It was a smother of time,
a stifling landscape of clocks
a decaying of darkness
The night gave way to trembling cold delirium
And slow and slow down
A slide from reality
Everything fell
I remember barely a glimmer- a hand, an arm, red sheets somewhere
Eyes that whispered "what's wrong with her? what's her deal?"
Or worse yet, faces that didn't care
To see me, my wrists
Appalling in all their shivering shaken chill dust
In moments like this,
I am nothing but a fearful machine
Broken in its deepest workings,
All function altered.
Clamors and tremors of panic
Withered illusions gathered at my feet like kittens
I tossed the blanket from the makeshift bed
Lay upon my back and waited
Watched, frightened, the night revealing
The hundred ignoble, vile images
Of which my thoughts seems consisted of
They flickered at bit- against the burgundy hammock
And empty Baccardi bottles
2 o'clock shook the memory
A crowd of twisted things,
Torn and stained and coiling about my wrists
I move by the sway of these thoughts that are curled around me
-The notion of some infinitely suffering thing
Oh I only need a lighthouse
To guide my soon-to-be shipwreck home
I only need a compass, a crucifix, a presence
But never
never to be found
the way
Jun 2, 2013
Jun 2, 2013 at 1:13 AM UTC
A duality of elan vital, two people
Spectres of emotion
Intertwined by a fuselage of bruised skin & tendon
Tissues become orbital, gushing towards grafts
Helixes of snot, **** and lymph
Boy & girl
As they embrace the animating principle and eachother, they fuse
A one piece tapestry adorned seamless with no hem, beginning or end
Always was, always is
Patiently turning to liquid as their being unzips
Lying figures of runny makeup and genetic *****
Quintessence, a texture of synaptic potential
Corpus Callosum
An entirety of self, lost in imbued disintegration
Theory of mind, looped & bound
I will water the thought
Roots envisaged in dystopian amygdala
Piercing data packets with a frost-like intensity
Forgetting our obsolescence moments ago
A neuron dipped in nylon
Theta waves and the non-euclidean crux of dissociation
Ghosts in the machine, your macro god
The sympathies of fractional distillation
Digitised/assimilated unto the nanosphere
Cold hands and brass backs galvanised in oscillated tears
Commodified, sold out and bought
Stretching, from purple, white and black
slowly losing its colour, amorphous in shape
brushed across a smudge, ambiguously chromatic
Monetised flesh god
An eternity bathed in starlight
Cutting an incision in the sky to allow entropy
Divided dimensions of energy
Fleeting and intangible
No longer a delirium of seperation
All semantics become light
As a rusted vehicle passes overhead
And all the worlds questions fade out of existence
Flutters of red tape and foregone growth of practice
Sinew flayed, integrated towards information
Our minds shared
In circuits and resistors
Photons and electrons
We radiate
Apr 1, 2014
Apr 1, 2014 at 10:49 AM UTC
The black snow runs down from the rooftops;
A red finger dips into your brow;
Blue snow flakes sink into the empty room,
They are a lovers’ dying mirrors.
Heavy and torn to pieces the mind muses,
Follows the shadow in the mirror of blue snow flakes,
The cold smile of a deceased harlot.
The evening’s wind weeps in the scent of carnations.
7.4k
Dear diabolic debutante / Spawn of the unfathomable abyss of blackness / Daughter of dreadful dead desire / Black-shrouded sinister sister of celestial gloom before whose imperious gaze the heavens fall silent / Whip-lash girl-child of the graves whose pallid visage kindles the myriad infernal fires / Autocratic vampiress of lunar doom whose winding-cloth enfolds the thousand horrors of blood-drenched nightmare / Thou that wanderest the cypress-crested hills of funereal necropolises / Whose icy glance cracks the ungraven tombstones of utter desolation / Empress of night and madness / Who stalks the locked and shadowed hallways of unhallowed thought / Whose burial-boat glides the still waters over Lethe’s silent depths to the unglimpsed isle of eternal mourning / Whose parapets tower above the fiefdoms of quotidian banality / Whose flying buttresses overlook the Stygian waters of the forgotten drowned denizens of damnation / Whose unshackled dungeons open to worlds of regal splendor / Whose spires pierce dark skies where oblivion buries the ruined cities of revelry under the drifting clouds of leaden time / Oh maiden of melancholic alchemy whose petrified passions transmute base metal into pure gold…
May the gibbous moon of equinox shine its baleful eye upon you; may you tread in sacramental calm the winding starlit paths of somnolent cemeteries; may my unmixed metaphors unveil in delirium their parabolic mysteries before the smoldering altar of your uninterpretable allegory; may the favor of your scorn forever lay me out, embalmed, undead, on the cold stone of merciless reality. Behold: in cryptic script of spectral apparition, in tracery of coded illumination, amidst the dawning rays of torment I write thine unknown name on the threshold of daylight. And from within the mortared wall of self I speak forth from my sepulcher the Sibylline utterance,
unsought, unheard, undreamt:
JUST WANTED TO SAY ‘HI’ !
☻
Sep 10, 2015
Sep 10, 2015 at 9:15 PM UTC
They have an app for everything
Apply this apple application vigorously
I need an app for this confusion
Where’re all the apps for my delusions
Hallucinations seem pretty nice
But I rather control them with an app
Delirium is no friend of mine
They control it with an app
All of these buttons produce bad business
You’re the ones who push them, I’m the witness
They take their pictures with an app
Photoshop the eye of the beholder
It’s the witching hour
They shout it from the watchtower
They climb up and down the ladder
They train the cruelest adders
With or without an app
Jul 18, 2012
Jul 18, 2012 at 10:09 AM UTC
*Hungered for a taste
of your elixir's essence,
drunken inhalations
of your poetry
a splendiferous whirl
of time & space 'tween
darkly scented moons
and sun's adoration,
blithe starry nights
amidst meditative new
dawn's effervesce,
spirited of the heart,
gleaned in the soul,
yearnings of another
chapter's paradise
universal experiences
etched of hourglass sand,
written upon endlessly
chimerical verses
wildflower gardens drenched
of dandelion's plum wine
swooning under a
hypnotic scripted spell,
intoxicating power
of unchained symphonies
dancing amongst skies'
released euphoria
resonating in a song's
reprised melodies,
breathlessness of delirium's
celestial pauses
in vaporous breezes'
unfurling undulation,
captivated by rhythmic
destiny reverberating in
loins' pleasurable calling
quenched of sacred
offering's quell
transcending earthly
persuasions' rhyme,
let me lick the nectar from
your poesy's insatiable lips,
sweet mercy's healing
captured in rapturous
surrender's reawakening ~*
*Je veux que vous tous,
tu me manques*
Ce que vous manquez de moi?
Jul 4, 2015
Jul 4, 2015 at 12:05 AM UTC
Lazily, a boy with silvery hairs muttering requiem aeternam
lifts his neck at the piercing radiance skimming off the eyeglasses rim,
and there looms the glory, the spotless sea of blue,
varnishes of spring gloss fuming out of the French coronation robe.
The still-brisk branches hung bent at the weight of vivacity,
sight of maidens whose eyes and grace bath in the full warmth of light,
the kisses on the face of the river by the shower of half-bloomed petals,
just as the stillborn thrills of the beating heart to the splintered fingers of Moirae.
The time of adieu,
the season of life.
The mourning procession amidst the lustily caressing May breeze.
-Primavera, thou name be the sweet irony of the dying flowers
The evening wades in, and the coy face of the mountain blushes;
Thence strides away the man whose gaze speaks of premature nostalgia
Here the wind whispers the rosy delirium from the sakura tree at the far side,
the faintness lushly hazed away by the cloudy veil of bittersweet grey.
Nov 15, 2012
Nov 15, 2012 at 7:13 AM UTC
Time passes by like a whistle in the wind. Ignored and only observed within the thickness of one's skin. The once gnawing temptation in Lula's eyes were now exchanged in kaput like a dead black swan in the lake.
It grew on her and she can only justify it by moving her legs back in forth and forward with her ballet shoes; she can only obtain her physical through the applause of everyone around her. Yet, there were trickles of blood forming inside her internal wound — as the piano strikes another note in A minor, she can only whisk in pain and undone drafts in her head. "Tis will be over", she raises her head upon the crowds heaping in excitement, she turned around and flew her wings upright and the heads of the audience once more clapped in vain and delirium nonsensical pleasure.
As Chopin's symphony were almost in the last note, she stood straight and made her way to the middle. There, she locked eyes with her forbidden lover and a small smile throughout. The intensity of another Vivaldi's winter classic can be grasp once more and another set up of white swans gathered together — formed a circle and she went in the middle. Her eyes turned black and her wings bleed another tint of jet black and crimson. The crowds awed in reverence and she soared above them. A starlet in the headless crowds and dreary sweet rustle of voices gave her another bliss.
And while she was served aloft, there were another macabre symphony that plays through the soft rough piano; it was a solemn prayer and they were the kind souls going up to the heavens.
"Go on, Salem. Play the winter magic," Salem could only look at his muse and he strike another note, passing notes two steps from their 'haven'.
Lula slowly ripped her wings for the last time and smiled to all the headless men. Her satin dress reveals her plumpy chest and an hourglass body. Lula is a goddess black swan. Men could only forward their eyes and threw her pennies once more and she could only move in her balletic conventional pose. For the last time, she flew with her black tinted wings and they were all beheaded.
The white swans began to sing in a solemn outcry until it became too remorseful. The white swans turned their heads down when they met Lula's dead eyes. Her laugh echoing the whole stadium with its own persona and it is like crawling down into waltz where it reaches their earshot. They can only sing in albeit and expensive heads started to explode.
"Two steps from hell," she sings.
May 30, 2021
May 30, 2021 at 7:11 AM UTC
darling
let us fill our lungs
with corruptive smoke
and descend into delirium
so we may appreciate the moments
when our breaths consist
of purely air
let us drown our stomachs with poison
so we may savor the potent mix
of acid and alcohol
searing our throats
and numbing our skin
let us sink our teeth
into the ripe flesh
of the forbidden fruit
and swallow the pit
while we´re at it
let us drink to forget
and kiss like careless strangers
as we bury ourselves under bodies
so we may feel something other
than the weight of the world
let us dance beneath a storm
not of rain
but of blood spilling out
of open wrists
with mouths gaping
and hearts shattered
let us relish these blurred eyes
and hazy memories
as our hands touch
but do not meet
let us hold each other too tight
skin bleeding into skin
nail marks freckling your back
i can no longer hear the music
so let us sing our beautiful lies
take my hand
and let us run through grayed streets
with reckless abandon
and as we go
we can pick the roses
allowing their thorns
to imprint new scars
between our fingertips
let us tear the feathers
from a white dove
so we may weave ourselves
wings to fly
to touch the sun
and steal icarus´ name
let us ignore our ambitions
and explore extremes together
let us shatter our expectations
and as two beings collide
let us breathe each other in
and indulge as if it were
our last moment on earth
darling
let us taste death together
x.
Jul 24, 2018
Jul 24, 2018 at 2:53 AM UTC
You’re my favorite pair of sunglasses;
White rims, rose-colored lenses.
Try you on, and the world just looks better for a while.
The muddy construction sites, this massive concrete jungle,
The blemish on my chin.
Each piece of trash on the sidewalk has a story.
Wandering strangers don’t seem strange;
Everything, and everyone, seems deliberate.
No distance seems too great to run,
No weight too heavy
To be lifted.
Sappy acoustic love songs sound
Like life’s most epic
Anthems,
In my car as I’m driving.
It’s the most beautiful delirium;
Every sight seen is a portrait,
Every word heard is a song.
Though at the close the day,
That rose light will dwindle on the rims of my lenses,
Turning the soft shade over my eyes to rigid shadow,
So that then nothing at all can be seen,
And all that is heard is hollow ambiance.
With this I shed my glasses,
To look upon an ordinary world,
Until the next sunrise, when I will undoubtedly don you again.
May 28, 2012
May 28, 2012 at 11:49 AM UTC
I wanna have lunch with Poe,
at Burger King,
because I'm sure he would appreciate how ghoulish that King in their commercial is
I don't want him to recite verse
while we fill our medium cups with corn syrup nectar--a giant leap
down from laudanum
I do want to ask about the Cask of Amontillado and being walled in slowly, for eternity
for to me that is creepier than all the crimson cream in the Masque of the Red Death
I want to know if he likes the fries--will he dare to dip them in scarlet paste we call catsup
mostly I want to know if he remembers the alley where he was found,
not yet a legend, consumed by consumption and delirium in equal measure
and if there were rodents privileged to hear his last whispered words--or even a gasp
I am buying, Ed, so grab that Whopper with both bony paws and tell me terrible tales, evermore
Sep 5, 2017
Sep 5, 2017 at 7:40 PM UTC
The night crawls under my skin
Fever delirium laced with heartbreak
in the cracks of my chapped lips
I let down my walls
Now kite drifting away like balloon let go
You were the walls of this maze called home
fog blanket me into Limbo called fever delirium hot and *****
icecream cone by the fireplace
defy the logic
cut the shoelaces
defy the logic
jump and walk on the sky
defy gravity
Swallow the whole **** ocean
Do the impossible
Have *** demand icecream for breakfast
throw punches in the street
Do drugs you don't know what they are what they do how they can hurt you
trusting abuse like a unicorn but it's just a horse
hear the dragon roar
Underneath the bed you make love on
your friends are sometimes the monsters
Spilling the probation all over the floor
Realize he's not sleeping next to you
He doesn't love you anymore
You can tell she hurts
Lives away from home
Digs teeth into words like wounds will heal like they are stitches
Fall for boy in coffee shop
Leave dream boat to pursue reckless thought
You give leaves
He gives you hope
Helps your lighthouse at sea float
Secretly as you sleep inside the sun
When your lighthouse work is done
He paints over the stripes
He thinks it is like the love story of your mother and father
She is angry with a tiny clustered house with the smell of her smoke filled lungs
He paints every room like reversing time
But it's all pretend, just men being men
Let the leaves burn
Steal the words from books
Cut them out
Cut your heart out
And try again
Nov 4, 2015
Nov 4, 2015 at 1:19 PM UTC
Taste me with all of your senses
Inhale my essence......breathe me in deep.....
Darkness pressed against hunger..
Sliding my tongue, I drew it in like a feast
Savouring the taste as it passed my lips...
Shadows cast silken threads
Screaming desire!
Spinning silken webs around my body,
Searing my skin, as hot breath spilled itself
Against my salted flesh...
Moisture and heat fused,
Savage, pulsating, lingering, where wicked hovered
Sleek, against my heart’s beat...
Black satin shivered beneath wildfire hips;
Slow dancing a sweetened heat,
Writhing beneath the shimmer-gleam;
As I lay for him, lathed by the parched desert of his
Relentless tongue...wearing me wet....
I moaned across his taut flesh,
Strewn beneath the sliding wander of skin thrusts,
Drowning in a plum-dark eclipse of heat!
Where tenderness lay opened for him...
Teasing breaths rushed kisses between thighs
Quivering,
Wanting to break free, the restraints,
Stretching my body beneath his tasting..
I felt the essence beating ****** tempo's,
Passion succumbing to insatiable need;
And I gave him my body's silk-white,
Trembling under the furtive delirium of our fever...
The fierce moon eclipsed
A serum to slide my quickened breath;
And his eyes watched, deep in dark, unchanging depths,
As I lay naked in his arms....................
Jan 14, 2013
Jan 14, 2013 at 4:28 PM UTC
*Sudden stammer mars his words as she gets closer,
in to a velvet pit of ecstatic delirium he quickly falls.
When her ****** scent sweeps him off his feet
his throat gets dry, grammar falters, words hide,
her audacious lips now, tenderly seek his timid ones
no more words, no worry about subject-verb agreement,
Let time begin all over again, in oblivion they swim.*
Mar 15, 2014
Mar 15, 2014 at 9:16 AM UTC
The needle-tip,
a bee sting
giving rise to a hive.
A sickening delirium
coursing mercurial under eyelids,
tapeworms and tendrils
weaving wildly:
teeming, churning tides breaking over
greedy teeth (a needy mouth
flaying flesh ferociously,
a fevered wolverine
whipping through a petting zoo).
Each agonizing second
slowly sliding by,
tacky molasses on cloth
covering a table in an innocuous
American home
bruises on mother's face
fade (eggplant to jaundice
to the crimson of the setting sun
dying behind the horizon
line {chopped across a counter-top
like a broken promise...}).
All the lives we compromise
trying to cage a swarm.
Jan 18, 2013
Jan 18, 2013 at 11:52 PM UTC
When I first see you, with eyes half-closed
imagining how your thin lips licked the edges of the sea,
remembering the primordial ooze, I think
I have come here to love you.
When you spread your flesh across the table
open your legs, pull at the lips and
make sounds that only I can hear, I whisper
I have come to love you
When you out move everyone I have ever loved,
bring your mouth to mine and in delirium
wash my face with the warm cloth, I realize
how love is tinted with empathic sadism.
When you finally utter my name in the same sentence as yours
as if your ***** hold all the stuff poets wish for
and my fingers find the seaweed surrounding your pink flesh
I know I love you.
Sustenance from the watery underworld
Food
Jan 7, 2014
Jan 7, 2014 at 1:31 AM UTC
O Christ—Thou rarest flower of hearts—Thou didst sail on the storm-tossed lake of prejudiced minds. Its evil-scented, gloomy thought-waves lashed Thy lily-tender soul. They crucified Thee with their evil. Yet Thou didst shed the aroma of goodness and forgiveness, and didst help them to be purified by remorse, so helping them to become attractively sweet-scented with Thine all-loving Flower-Soul.
O Thou Great Lover of error-torn brothers—an unseen monument of the mightiest miracle of love was established in each heart when the magic wand of Thy voice uttered: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Thou hast healed the cataract of hatred, and now we have grown to see: "Love thine enemies as thyself, for they are thy brothers—though sick and sleeping."
Thou hast taught us not to increase their delirious kicks of hatred by battering them with the bludgeons of revenge. Thine undying sympathy hath inspired us to heal and wake our brothers, suffering from the delirium of anger, by the soothing salve of our forgiveness.
Thy crucifixion reminds us of the daily crucifixion of our fortitude by trials, of our wisdom by ignorance, of our self-control by the scathing hands of temptation, and of our love by misunderstanding.
Thy test on the cross proved the victory of Thy wisdom over ignorance, of Thy soul over flesh, of Thy happiness over pain, and of Thy love over hatred. So are we heartened to bear our crosses bravely and pleasantly. Teach us to pour out sweetness when crucified by harshness, to bear with calmness the assault of worries, and to give understanding unceasingly to those who unjustly hate us.
O Shepherd of Souls, wandering hearts are of themselves seeking the one fold of divine devotion. We have heard the ever-calling music of Thine infinite kindness. Our one desire is to be at home with Thee, to receive the Cosmic Father with joyous, open eyes of wisdom, and to know that we are all sons of our own One God.
Teach us to conquer the Satan of dividing selfishness, which prevents the gathering of all brother-souls into the one fold of Spirit.
Calling to one another by the watchword: "Love him who loves you, and love all who love you not," let us rally beneath the canopy of the universal sense of Christ-Oneness. Amen.
Whispers from Eternity
A Book of Answered Prayers
1949 Edition
3.2k
avenue sounds are never agreeable, ignore the drift,
ignore the hum,
ignore the suburban neophytes in the city lights (I never did care much for hipsters).
ignore rapid eye movements, the flush red face, ignore the snapshots of you that adorn my semi-sleep state
I stare at my ceiling and see the cobblestone summer streets you once graced, long ago in the eternal occident, I want to ignore but I’m so very boozed, in a blue lucid slumber:::
eyes closed::: my head spins and sleep begins with the tidal delirium of dopamine drips, your legs, your hips, I’m drowning a bit, doused in a sanguine sweat inside a fantasy **** I’m dreaming of you**)
Synaptic friction
she is a pleasant fiction
flash/sparks segue a dormant memory ,
the two of us riding familiar highways::: she gazes at me with her usual emerald encased ocular torment, those limbal rings cast aspersions at the last vestiges of my will power, until, I’m done, done in by the divinity of her lips:::
There is no end to (your) energy
It even finds me here::: in my dystopian dream (eternal)
now
an inescapable, **myopic curse
(nocturnal)**:::
the nightmare of not having you near
Awake, I roll over to clutch for the pacifier of your comfort (violent midnight)
I find only a fragrance,
i flail, searching, when those flashbacks fall short
isolated into the banality of bedsheets and pillows pleats
(the retrograde nature of my reality, now readily apparent)
cdh
Jan 22, 2019
Jan 22, 2019 at 12:28 AM UTC
Paranoia seeps in my veins
You bit me
And now I'm poisoned
He tries to **** the venom out
Only I can do that
But I am not strong enough
This delirium
Is all I have left
Of you, of us
Ten years
Left to crumble into dust.
Jul 27, 2014
Jul 27, 2014 at 7:33 AM UTC
outside of the spirited delirium
of our quaint sabotage
and with all the moxie of a tick,
nestled in steel wool -
head down in the futility. beyond -
the aspirations of
a snowflake in an open
wound.
love
is the riddle of
our days
every
Night.
and we swallow
with our eyes
no moon.
Aug 10, 2015
Aug 10, 2015 at 12:09 AM UTC
I saw him at work;
When he would visit the mangal
With a ***** over his shoulder.
He rolled up his pant legs and walked
Through the tidal wash. Once he had picked a tree,
He hacked for three days to cut
The mud and the mangrove
Free from the surrounding forest.
He piloted his self-made island into the lagoon.
Shortly, he became mangrove crazy,
A disease he called Rhizophoria
In the notebook he had taken along.
With mud lobsters and tree for his only company,
Of course he had mangrove on the brain.
His life became an ellipsis—
The two centers were the tree and himself.
From tubular mangrove branches, propagules fattened,
And seeds nested inside them;
He would scribble notes with delirium as they fell
Plumply into the lagoon
And were pulled away by the warm current.
Each time the tree condensed its salt
Into a sacrificial leaf,
He would sadly add a tick
To the tally of the dead he kept in his book.
He once wrote:
‘The salt is burning my eyes.’
Late afternoons, with beer in our hands,
We would watch him from the beach,
Five hundred yards away.
Eventually, his mangrove island drifted ashore—
He lay by the suberic roots
With a crust of salt along his cheek.
May 4, 2010
May 4, 2010 at 9:45 PM UTC