A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

The solitary fingertip
stroking gently

her left cheek

becoming a dam
for the tears

that overwhelm
the trembling finger

the overflowing tears
glistening upon his nail

he kisses
her tears

they taste of salt
and love

her dying

These breathless moments

Dreams flutter boundless

Pinioned on stellar winds

Constellations rise in indigo eyes

And I pull in spinning

Euphoric aspirations glow

In vertigo as the accretion heats

Birthing a new universe

I am astounded by the light



Interminable epochs

Found me comatose

At the divination point

The juncture of the void and life

I dance the staccato steps of departure

Memory of thin skin disappears

Beatific vision shimmers

In glistened entreaties

Lacrimae sunt arma femina.

Console me with forever

The emulation of flight defines me

Zenith in your twilight skies

On Heaven's breath I rise

*tears are the weapons of woman

TL Boehm
2/22/08

My Latin teacher would always say
English is a terrible language
I was in Rome for a few days
Sunt lacrimae rerum

My grandparents' home was comforting
Family
Food
Christmas

Snow
***
Yo
Ex

                       Sanctuary

thank god for the dead memory.
thank god, that it died while it was still good.
thank god, that it still resembles something i might’ve prayed for.

thank god, that i prayed for the death i didn’t know.
thank god, that my tears couldn’t well up
for the spring on the other side of your death’s door.
thank god, yours was the first rain that taught me
what umbrellas were for.

thank god, that thanking god is such an empty phrase.
thank god, that it won’t grant you afterlife praise.
thank god, you’re now only a picture on a wall.
thank god, the effigies i bear in mind cannot be canonized,
for the things they’ve never done,
and the people they never were.

i
Painted face sits shotgun
on a pennyfarthing chakra
ridden blindfold.

A twist of spine
swings him pendular
every beat, a half-finished bongo trill
nudges black berets askew.
Goatee stubble corrals galloping speech
into enclosures.

Break comma stop.

ii
The chorus,
a fat thousand-eyed mollusk gapes:
he juggles
a bomb
an asp
a knife.

Does he
drop the bomb, ****** the knife,
let the poisonous snake bite?

With child's plainspokenness
we play rock scissors paper
with death’s ivory hands waiting.

Bomb shatters knife
knife slices snake
snake eludes bomb.

The marks whelp their joy
clapping, weeping
with the thousand hands and eyes
of Guishan Guanyin.

Azrael's eyes
drowned in narcotics
***** from the shadows.
Pupils dilate, prolapse
in a unison of aqueous humour.

A blur of dervish
swallows the air
spreads like virus.

iii
Outside the amphitheatre
wings grazing crumbling walls
Azrael peddles dice.

"Worn from the teeth of a dead Logos," his voices sing
his nebulae of tongues clicking against teeth
arrayed like tombstones inside his abysses of mouths
breath smelling of hemlock and grift.
His stock sells out.

After a rainy night of craps
we hissed graft
in the whorl of the priest's ear.
He went home to bed
and dreamt of riches
pouring from the wounds
of sweat-shop children.

iv
In the morning
eight bells peal.
Eyelids hummingbird beneath a black sun
choking the sky over Styx.

Flayed by owls
flendo cinere
we bask in charcoal
and spit obols
into the ferryman's blistered hand.

Virgil.  The Aeneid.

I had to write the poems
The poems come from pain

Please pray for my wife
I'm near La Mancha, Spain

The sadness will last forever
37 years

La Florida my past
La Florida, my dears

Sunt lacrimae rerum
Tears, idle tears

Latin in the morning
Latin at JMU
Latin y Latino
I roam in Rome for you

Sunt lacrimae rerum
But joy returns anew
The ecstasy, St. Teresa
My cousins at Gesu

            Et tu?

powerless when confronted with death
    gentleness of children’s breath
             sunt lacrimae rerum
      
                      Qoheleth

When the anxiety comes
Patience

When the memories come
Asians

Fight not yet over
Newman Center, UNC

Sunt lacrimae rerum
But she wished joy to me

                  3.

It's just religious emotion
I have it too
Comes and goes, overflows
Pondicherry Zoo

Hold my children dear
Live the dailiness
Whisper in your ear
Try to do my best

2 years of Latin
But I wasn't very good
Rome on my honeymoon
And in my neighborhood

Sunt lacrimae rerum
And in my mind as well
Thanksgiving coming soon
Call me Ishmael