I remember the first time you tasted champagne.
As the golden nectar effervesces down your throat, you whispered my name.
I raised an eyebrow and wondered why,
you said, “You’re everything this glass contains.”

They tell me the tale of Dom Pérignon
who said, “I am tasting the stars” after a sip of his own creation.
You’ve always loved me like I tasted of stars,
and I loved you like you put the stars where they belonged.

We made the mixture of magnificence,
until we were twisted too much on the shelves.
Pop, bubble, hiss--- all shaken up
everything we bottled up spilled down until nothing else is left.
I was champagne until I became your problem.

And somewhere in between the lines, we got lost in translation
I didn’t know where to find you, didn’t know how else to meet you halfway,
but there was pain whichever path I take.
I was already walking the track for the exiled, I didn’t realize right away.

Others hide a ring in the glass,
But we put the problem in the champagne, babe.

Soon it will taste differently to you,
All sweet and sparkling—no strings attached like it used to.
But the stars are no longer where they used to be.
Every sip will wash down any trace of me,
until you forget.
But it will forever linger on my lips;
and I’ll always remember it all too well.

Matthew 19:5 …a man shall leave his mother and father and be united firmly to his wife and the two shall become one flesh…

Are we simply stardust
Celestial fallout somehow sentient
The connection that effervesces between us
Happy accidents
Or is there that spark of the divine
Helixes and Holy angels
Spin a different plane
Eternal DNA
Existence beyond physical
This side of forever

Sacred accretion
Boundaries blurred
Do I begin then where you end
The weak made strong
Sight to the blind
And love the ultimate healer
For hearts torn asunder
Broken parts made whole
Bound by ties that set us free

I cleave to you
Under sparkling stars
Gentle passion envelopes us
Pulse and breath as one
You surrender pleasure to me
Wild moments sublime
We scatter seeds of immortality
Fertile earth
Breath over water
A single spark in darkness
And the universe
begins anew
TL Boehm
11/3/07

A mysterious being of immeasurable force.

She plays men like puppets
made to stretch every molecule
toward an unattainable fleeting notion of perfection,
only to have it yanked ever so abruptly out of reach. She sends them
spiraling into an emotionally sadistic cycle of perpetual
pain, punctuated by brief moments of blissful ignorance.
She is a siren of the soul, singing a song of promise that creeps out and lassoes the heart.

Her flowery perfume of victory effervesces toward the unknowing sailor,
filling the emptiness he has dug into himself. The smallest whiff spreads
hope - an invasive vine through the body,
wrapping around sinews, planting thorns like anchors
refusing to ease up their iron clad grip.

We hold onto this impossibly small beacon of light
as if our very lives depend on the grip
with which we keep this air of possibility, all the while
this very thing is what is pulling us down
into the watery crypt of depression – head over heels, plunging
deeper into the darkness so we no longer know which way is up.
It is here that she takes her prey. The once beautiful maiden is now
the innermost fear of man.

She engulfs her prey and the blackness follows.

I lay here waiting in my skin for the tearing of the membrane
that seperates this world from the next one and I let myself
get carried along by a fresh stream of reasoning until I
flare up in the dark like a new species of amoeba

this balancing and spinning around on an atom and just not
falling off it becomes boring at times and maybe because of that
sporules once landed here to grant us the possibility
of another possibility

I lay here waiting and I manage not to drown just like only
an almost newborn baby can and being born in 1983
means nothing here in the swelling infinity
of the abnormal

my skin has been waiting for new atmospheres for decades
and the touch of unknown forms makes me shudder with
raw impervious happiness because invisible energy
effervesces alongside my arms and the eyes in my skull
could be anyone’s right now

suddenly the waiting is forgotten and I wallow myself
in the gathered fairy tales of every soul that preceded me
carelessly astonished and uncapable of understanding
the seriousness of this absurd life

inside me irrational poetry dances
like a tribe jumping around a bonfire

outside the universe
dances her own eternity
round and round

Poetry effervesces from the soul
Sparkling to the surface effortlessly in tiny
Disconnected bubbles.
No champagne can capture the
Joy of rising bubbles from within.

Sometimes it
pops up
Sweet and salty like popcorn;
Exciting, fresh and crisp.

Or it rumbles up from a deep well of fire
And spits
Out
Red and hot, searing and purging
From a swirling mass of magma.

Fireworks don't come easily and fizz and pop and die-
Champagne has to wait in cold and dark-
Popcorn cannot nourish and bubbles simply pop!
But diamonds deftly cut can  clarify.

I may tend to the soil.

At 21, growing flowers with my cries for help
Feels criminal, ridiculous. Those ******* children,
On their mute petals flourish jealously
In more lush and verbal company,
But their speak fades out as color and as light
The last of the sounds is celebration and surprise.

Of course, I am tied to this soil, watching waves
And waves of new life rise in clouds of pollen,
Migrating and impatient; New things seem to form,
Divisions where there is only space barring austere tongues
Their desired juices, but I command Myself, abstain,
And keep the teeth and silence like fences
Made of mockery, ridicule, and other forms of self-control.

And yet, the time of false gods effervesces in a comforting dream
When I feign sleep, vines creeping up while I regret their invitation
Standing amongst them, beautifully crafted shapes, lacking color.
I admonish quietly, I suggest furtively, I command passively
And amongst plenty of others, I am one open eye, a slit for lamentations
And they are the doomed recanters of permanence, forever happy
Forever in death, there is no time to wither.

Beseech God when the marooned epithets of concerted factitious pestilence swarm the fragility of any given mindset and poised circumstance embedded in concrete pangs of waged valor in the tepid waters of malevolence that test men of faith with the plodding crabwhiskers of enduring ignominy

Reach with tenacity and react with temerity to the jilted wisdom of a profligate time and return yourselves to the propriety expected not only of upstarts but also of garden-variety gentility that needs few ways to gerrymander reality so that the exclamations of praise overwhelm the din of negativism

This earth is a temporary test proctored by supernal forces that can be savage, grim, morose or commonplace but wilting in hopelessness is the machination of the schadenfreude of perilous doubt domineering over an age of rampant apostasy, an artifice for evil to flower into the dissemblance of good. Thankfully this draconian subterfuge is an eradicable foe of the stygian imprecations of an otherwise benevolent wholesome design that can recede into obscurity rather than burgeon into a self-fulfilling cycle of enmity begetting the jingoistic fervor of useless antagonism or internecine divisiveness that is fractious in its perpetual erosion of the common good

Remain vigilant in your sempiternal quest to find the modesty of better pastures more lucrative than the privation of meretricious gaudy sentimentalism that infects the world with maudlin pretense rather than perdurable righteousness that effervesces when the ultimatums of the community united by individualistic impetuses outweighs the stagnant gravitas of sobering misperceptions of pragmatism

We exist on this earth primarily but not exclusively because of the magnanimity of creation not the barbarity of destruction that besets the pathways of righteous adherence to a modernism of faithful reclamation of sportive frolicking and joyous exultation of mores that are bolted firmly in place in a configuration suitable for the cavernous prosperity of an evolving planet destined to be commodious rather than pestered by reproachable fearmongering snollygosters of killjoy damnation that condemn by jaundiced standards of hypocrisy or the deplorable bonfires of outmoded witch hunts of depraved perjury against the ‘golden rule’

Most will flicker between righteousness and evil but the prevalent force among the faithful communities is the adherence to credence in belief rather than credulousness in discord a cleavage between those who understand teleological certainty and those who vacillate with the sting of superstition corroding their intrepid resolve to engineer the ingenuity of an artful time without the beguiling artifice eroding every specious gewgaw away along with the prized consequentialism of unheralded heroism that should be bequeathed instead of neglected by the asperity of abominable rejection authored by conventional simpletons marauding with freebooter wealth and ill-gotten gains in pandered exploitation

Tides exist because the moon is the centerpiece of a grand configuration that rivets the earth with eternal lambent light and recondite guidance that withstands the vagaries of modern alienation that pivots upon primal fears and sworn enemies of the gleeful interface of flesh becoming soul and soul becoming flesh the cacoethes of life that refuses to be squelched quietly by benighted ignorance and balkanizing mythmakers who prize useful apostasy over amaranthine integrity to the ultimate veracity of God

Time is the ultimate father of existential doubts but also the solution and gradient of all empirical knowledge and it is the bedrock of primeval constellations that amaze in the foudroyant firmament that has been tested and transcended by the artifacts of modernity but never ceases to flicker with a dainty prestidigitation of the imaginative heart aspiring to be one with cosmogony rather than the insemination of a lamentable lechery with miscegenated and stilted justice

So, when the darkness of solitude and gingerly seances with wraiths of haunted memories clasp you in tenacity and acerbic derision, remember that the perfection of faith is abiding by the precepts that have rollicked and soared upon the convenience of fate without fatalism and determination without determinism
Live life boisterously when the swelling abundance of fruitful generations culminate with felicity and temper the vilification of paragons of the wrong path subside from your countenance and outlook because eternal grace exists to make the sluggish buoyant and the hubristic humble to find a rightful equipoise that exists as a mandala of perfect archetypal divinity

We falter sometimes with venial grievances or dart towards the glossolalia of the glitterati, but this world teaches us that a creative verve and a congenial panache are enough to convey the ultimate beatific goal of any virtual space that exists not just as an inclement test but as a domain for experiments in moral justification of sanctified human communities existing with irenic calm rather than bellicose velocity of depredated pristineness that should always remain inviolable despite the exhaustive nature of combustible finitude

The placid pond of peaceful accord with nature is a staple of a heeded naturalism that seeks the preservation of the sentience of earth and its dalliance with all of the blessed creatures that navigate our seas and our forests and sometimes even our homes as we unite to find communion with the vital energies of animation in a world captured in still life but never forgotten for the staid moments of contemplation that punctuate a good day or flummox a bewildered forest of tribal temptations and the shibboleths of irresponsible stewardship

The wagered war between industry and inferiority is the linchpin of all robust creative endeavors as the nutritive soil inhabited by mustard seeds gets embedded by the bonhomie of prolixity in explicating the stern juxtaposition of livid dastardly discord and beatific redemptive pulchritude… two coexisting forces that gallop by the same circumstantial waggish wits of raillery compounded by the plangent complaints of the oppressed or the exultations of the blessed

Inequity is a primordial condition arbitrated not by a Calvinist determinism but by the apportionment of divine might that is reconciled by the eleemosynary justice of a world quick to forgive and swift in magnanimity that sprawls the canvass of life with the duality of erratic sportsmanship and slugabed acquiescence because the principle of fair charity is incommensurable with the mammon of the selfish but those that transcend mere heroism and find commensurable teleological goals will heal the wounds created by the pesky urchins of infernal origin by the miraculous brunt of technology combined with an attentive tenacity to find the blotches in the tributaries that converge upon an “oceanic oneness” of a virtually infinite universe teeming with life and abounding with the kind of love that makes life worth living

We fight therefore a war that seeks ennobled intellects to wage inveighed invective against the giant tortoise created by the inertia of established monoliths of changeless malversation that stagnates or sabotages the eminence of creative titans because of the credentialed bias of quacksalver apothecaries of protean human manipulation occluding the passage of light to darkened cloisters of poverty and privation

Relics of the ancient law have been pilloried and the stultification of creed is commonplace among the dilettantes of jaundiced freebooting that hitches itself to the yoke of de facto immobility where there would otherwise exist bountiful harvests of friendly gainsay and giddy adventurisms that ameliorate the conditions of the world by the apportioned joy granted with largesse by the visionaries who defied the tropes of their quaint vestigial strictures and gallivanted with punctual temerity towards the favor of the Lord and The Way

Bureaucratic gridlock is the prodrome of an improper concordance with misguided altruism conflated with the boondoggles of trepidation that quivers like a reflexive dependency on banausic pretense hardly worth the limelight of regal consideration because a free-for-all flotilla of endless trinkets proffered by the resourceful but malicious prestidigitation of engorged coffers is not a tenet of true altruism but in fact a malady of duplicitous despotism seeking control in a world ennobled by feral gregariousness rather than huddled conformity around a collectivist bonfire of pilfered dearth
To follow “The Way” is to look beyond pettifoggery in deliberation or the limits of reasonable enumerated consideration and instead to ferret out the sordid from the irreproachable and strike compromise without ontological fault or deontological violation a reclaimed theology modernized and galvanized by not gaudy artificialism but by a generous heap of empathy enriched by the approximation of sympathy that is never certain it knows the boundaries of sentient despair or enlivened beatitude but that is careworn enough to reach the frayed limits of possible consideration that fathoms the prolific wisdom of vicarious destiny

Happenstance often dictates the gamut of opportunity and meted justice sometimes falters on the side of dreary expanses of untenanted time frittered away with either streamlined attempts at etiolated purpose or aimless attempts at vilified destruction of the gambled moments we stake so much in but either way every moment is drenched in redemptive potential to be configured into reclaimed chastity or virtuoso coruscation because few things are irrevocable and many things are instructive in our pursuit of self-actualization

Heap plaudits upon the dreamy dance with creativity in sculpted destinies preordained in the aboriginal abeyance that existed before time itself was a parameter of design and relish the eternal now as the keepsake of placid recompense or dramatic stagecraft designed to amuse but never to deter our purpose through oblivious diversion painted by glibness rather than bedecked with soteriological redemption

Some poltroons stagger through life looking for the crabwise enlightenment of a parceled existence patient to abide by some nomothetic decorum and others dart toward their streamlined destinies with a galloping insistence on the clarity of a clarion purpose to be trumpeted from a perch guarded by bulwarks of sturdy poise enhanced by the bonhomie of righteous solidarity
Those that struggle are tempered by the contingencies of tentative conditions of worth rather than predestined for a vouchsafed failure by design and most people are capable of transcending the wilted anachronisms of dragooning leviathans that withhold autarky to create dependency and trample over divinity to meet expediency in credulous goals that are at odds with viable cohesiveness of design.

The pressures exist to reform our system of codified law not so that it is more procrustean but so that the promethean and herculean forces of nature that enshrine liberty can exert their jaunty exceptionalism for a revived human fraternity in an age of virtualized demassification of loneliness amalgamated by trite rewards for the farcical pretense of banausic conformity exacerbated by the warped genocide of dreamers by utopian conformists who seek nothing more than a tractable pragmatism rather than a capricious diversity of thought, conduct and soldered unity around worthy rather than factitious ideals

The absolutisms of wretched quotidian deliverance from the modern maladies of isolative individuality need to converge upon an outcome that touts some elements of pragmatism but flickers with sempiternal ambitions for livelihood and the faultless regalia of love even when chiseled away at by the bickering of loss and the jaded emeralds of keepsake infatuations evaporating with the cruelty of timeworn contrition and attrition but abnegation only leads to abreaction and the original simpers of inhibition only lead to a glowering lament of what was squandered rather than what was achieved

Seek in life the memorialized glimmer of daunting promises becoming realized certainties that span the ages with timeless wisdom that withstands the vagaries and vicissitudes of aleatory yields that kowtow only to the fertility of gilded opportune purpose rather than the permanence of hallowed relevance to any era beset by portentous pestilence undergirded by groveled heaps of graft or ennobled with swanky prosperity because of the proper apportionment of useful proprieties that are rarefied by sidereal encounters with glitz and chance discoveries of serendipity

The trajectory of divinity is enigmatic because muddled prescience is the prerogative of cherubim that drape themselves with the hedged verdure of secrecy in their furtive attempts to engineer reality but find themselves corrupted by insightful ploys of bonanza guarded by rigmarole and obfuscation commandeered by ignoble wraiths of malicious dereliction bolted to the rudimentary rivets of overriding mammon

Despite this infiltration of sidereal gambits by the sworn benefactors of the progeny of the modern human condition our optimism should graze on the fact that destiny is ultimately the bailiwick of the supreme architect of all axiomatic laws and the lord of all sentient creations that graze upon the pabulum of ascendant times for the barnacles of ingenuity and the creatures of generosity whose largesse enlarges the scope of human endeavors and creates a cyclical expansion of the imaginative prowess of all beings through the tug and tide of dreams that become more extravagant over time because of or despite cultural enrichment or decline

The new paradigm is convalescent because it swerves away from both erratic wretched apathy of destructive manipulation or glorified embalmed foofaraw for sedentary immobility and dares with picaresque flair to challenge the authenticity of established narratives not with a paltry antinomian cavil or a slick Astroturf protest but with a strident mentality of newfangled inventiveness and careful altruism that vouchsafes the decline of opprobrium and the renewal of the righteous pursuit of happiness that extends beyond fugacious memories of judgmentalism that is self-neglectful but of second chances of munificence offered freely to the barnacles of just deeds and proper words

My heart breaks in seventeen different directions.
The white realm between my eyes glares back at me
Initially, I think he’s trying to hurt me
Forcing me to stay
But then hope effervesces in 1 new direction
Up, out.
Stay and feel he says
You need to heal he says
He's just a mar stapled upon a pure surface
He's just blank and broken
Clean and vast and warm and open
And can’t I be this wall
And can’t I just be free
From all this pain that's hindering me
“Stay” he says
“You'll never be the same” he says
And so he holds me
Compelling me to stay in the most rugged of places
Shifting when its time for me to move forward
He wasn't trying to hurt me
He just wanted to help me
Relieve the scar I painted for myself
When I cast my burdens upon the shelf
And never bothered to look
Never bothered to feel
And chose to reject what was so devastatingly real
I’m enamored by this blank space
I’m mesmerized by my own old pain
I want to leave but I finally listen and stay
The white wall becomes me
We hold each other’s gaze
And we stay and feel and then move away
To a new pose where the false okayness
Is really okay.

Those precious locks that glow like firelight,
they lighten up the brightest of days,
shine my world in darkest night.
Those eyes so blue like drops of ocean hue,
I could get lost in those constellations,
they are the prettiest of views.

Your soul is a mixture of burgundy and cinnamon,
a golden red so intoxicating,
what a lethal combination.
That smile you wear that shows so wide,
gleaming white pearls ‘tween lips,
from the crimson you sighed.

That fire within you dances so well with mine
that I can hardly take the breathlessness,
calm myself with a glass of wine.
Share a glass with me and give a toast to the universe
for bringing you and I together,
I hope our life isn’t terse.

You love good love and our love is true,
it effervesces with beauty,
our lives are born anew.
I left my heart open and you made yourself at home,
and brought with you perfection,
I swear I will never roam.

I give you all the love I could ever give,
you gave me hope in darkness,
a life I could finally live.
Our sorrows have now given way to delight,
I could tell you I love you every day,
I could show you every night.

All those I Love Yous would never ever come close
to how much you mean to me,
your love is a lethal dose.
“Find what you love and let it **** you,”
said Bukowski and I swear
it is all coming true.

I bathe in your light and your angelic radiance,
and I want to recite the poems you like,
and in your arms I’d dance.
Let’s create the finest art the world has ever seen,
they say your home is your castle,
will you be my Queen?