The Checkout Line

I wish to speak with you
ten years from now, you'll be ten years behind.

The words and meanings you carry in your pants, the pick-pocket steals your hopes from time.
and the visions of empty trash receptacles
with their late evening drunken lovers' bouts, at restless end tables. And the bums with their ******* attitudes **** covered clothes, and soiled minds

the clarity of the curbside drunk, picking up shades of filtered cigarettes of twilight scandalous
pickup lovers in their evening best.

And to talk with you ten years from now, you'll be ten years behind.

They're Green Beret head ornaments
detailing the porcelain platforms of Delft
Lining up for one last line to carry them into another faded sunrise at dawn's forgotten memory of yester night
and they walk their gallows holding pride fully their flags of exalted countrymen.

The republic of teacups of literary proficiency.
Wearing the necklaces of paid tolls to an afterlife they find in the miniscule car crashes of engagement with a grinless driving mate in a neighboring car in its pass into the forethought of turned corners.
Where they befell the great disappointment of failure in the frosted eyes of their fathers' expectations.

Who carried the shame of their mother's incessant discontent through short skirts, and high heels.

Who disapproved of the **** whom wore the sneak-out-of-the-house-wear clothing line, and traveled by night over turbulent asphalt by way of sidecar through turn and turnabout hand-over-hand contracts of lover's affection, and slept in tall grasses of wet nightfall with views of San Francisco, and were trapped in the inescapable Alcatraz and Statesville of unconsenting parents and their curfews,

through trials and trails of Skittles leading to after school Doctor visits in the basement of a doting mother, whilst she sits quietly in her exclusive quilting parties with noble equities of partners in knowledge, listening to Edith Piaf and the like,

All the while condemned to time, trapped in the second hand, hand me downs of the 21st century, decades of decadent introverts with their table top unread notebooks, and old forgotten score cards, and the numbers of scholars of years past,

and to talk with you ten years from now will be my greatest pleasure, for you will be....ten year's behind.


They push the sterile elevator buttons, and descend upon the floor of scents flourishing from their crowded family rooms, only aware of distinctive flavors, in their middle eastern shades of desert gumbo,

Who speak ribbit and alfalfa until midnight of the afternoon, sharing fables of slaughtered giraffes and camels that walked from Kiev to Baghdad in a fortnight,

Who are aware the power is out, but continue to scour for candles in a dark room where candles once burned, where candle wax seals the drawers of where candles can be found. Where once sat gluttonous kings and queens in Sunday attire waiting for words of freedom from the North.

of Florence, Sochi,Shanghai
of Dempster, Foster, Lincoln
of Dodge, Ford, Shelby

Of concrete fortune tellers in 2nd story tenement blocks with hairy legs, and head lice, wearing beautiful sachets of India speaking ribbit and alfalfa.

On their unbirthdays they walk the fish tanks wearing their birthday suits to remind them who serves the food on the floors of the family room fish mongers tactics.

The old men wear gargoyles on their shoulders.

Lo! Fear has crept the glass marbles of their wisdom and fortune, blearing rocket ships and kazoos on the sidewalks of their Portuguese forefathers.

Where ancestry burns cigarette holes in the short-haired blue carpet, where Hoover breaks flood waters of insignificance across hard headed Evangelical trinities.

Who share construction techniques one early morning at four, where questions of Hammer and **** build intelligence in secondary faces of nameless twilight lovers, who possess bear blankets, and upheavals, finely wired bushes of ***** maturity. Eating *** and check, tongue and pen.

Where police caress emergency flame retardants over the fire between their legs, wielding the chauvinistic blade of comfort in the backseat of a Yellow faced driving patron.

With their innocent daughters with their nubile thighs, and malleable personalities, which require elite words and jewelry. Wearing wheat buns, Longfellow, and squire.

Holding postmarked cellular structure within their mobile anguish.

Who go curling in their showers, pushing afternoon naps and pretentious frou-frou hats over tainted friendships with their girlfriend's brothers with minimum paychecks'.

Through their narcissus and narcosis, their mirrored perceptions of medicinal scripture of Methamphetamine and elegant five-star meat.

Who amend their words with constitutional forgiveness, in their fascist cloth rampages through groves of learning strategies. And the closets, cupboards, and coins
with rubber hearts, steel *****, and gold *****,

Tall-tales of sock puppet hands with friendly sharing ******* techniques, dry with envy, colorful scabs, and coagulation of eccentric ****** endeavors, With their social lubricants and their tile feet wardrobes with B-quality Adidas and Reeboks gods of the souls of us. Who possess piceous syndromes of Ouiji boards in their parent’s basements.

When will fire burn another Bush? Spread the fire walls of Chicago, and part grocery store fields of food. Wrapping towels under the doors of smoke filled lungs, on the fingernails of a sleepover between business executives with the neoprene finish of their sons and daughters who attend finishing school, with resumes of oak furnishings,

And I long to talk with you ten years from now,
For you'll be talking ten years behind.

Who profligate their padded inventories breaking Mohammed and Hearst,
laying the pillows of cirrus minor
waiting for the rain to paint the eyes of the scriptures which waft through concrete corridors,
and scent the air with their exalted personas,

With the different channels of confusions, watching dimple past freckle, eating the palms of our tropical mental vocations to achieve purity from the indignation of those whom are contemptuous for lack of innocence in America,
this America, of lack of peace,
of America hold me,
Let me be.

Whom read the letters off music, blearing Sinatra and Krall, Manson where is your contempt?

Manson where is your manipulation of place settings?, you deserve fork and knife, the wounded commandments that regretfully fall like timber in an abandoned sanctuary of Yellowstone,
Manson, with your claws of the heart.
Manson, with your sheik vulgarity of **** cloaks exposing your ladies undercarriage,

Those who take their pets to walk the aisles of famished eyes,
allowing the dorsals of their backsides to wonder aimlessly through Vietnam and Chinaman,
holding peace of mind aware of their chemical leashes and fifteen calorie mental meals, holding hands, unaware of repercussion,

With their vivid recollections of sprinkler and slide, through dew and beyond,
Holding citrus drinks to themselves, apart from pleasure, trapped with excite from sunsets, and in-between.

Withholding reservation of tongue to lung.
Flowing ribbit and alfalfa, in the corridors of expected fragrance.

and to speak with you of ten years from now, will be a pleasure all my own, for you will be talking ten years behind.

They walked outside climbing over mountains of shrapnel, popped collars
and endless buffets of emotion,
driving Claremont all the way to art gallery premiers
and forever waited for plane crash landings
and the phone calls that never came

Glowing black and white cameras
giving modelesque perceptions to all-you-can-eat eyes
giving cigarettes endless chasms of light

Colored pavement trenches and divots
cliff note alibis
and surgery that lasted until the seamstress had gone into an
endless rest
and
empty cupboards

Classic stools painted with sleepless white smoke and bleached canvas rolling tobacco with the stained yellow window panes of feral tapestry and overindulgent vernacular

Like a satiated cheeseburger weeping smile simple emotion
on November the 18th celebrations
and Wisconsin out of business sales

Too much comfort, stealing switchboards from the the elderly, constantly putting gibberish into
effortless conversation.

Dormant doormats, with the greetings that never
reached as far as coffee table favelas,
arriving to homes of famished
furniture, awaiting temperate lifestyles and the window sill arguments from pedantic literacy

Silver shillings and corporate discovery clogged the persuasive
push and shove
to and from

Killing enterprise
loquacious attempt at too soon
much too soon
too soon for forever

Wall to wall post-card collages
happy reminders of the places never visited by drinks in the hands of
those received

Registered to the clouded skies of clip board artists
this arthritis of envy
of bathtub old age
wrinkled matted faces
logged with quick-fixes, anemia, and heart-break

disposed of off the streets
of youth, wheeling and wailing
rolling down striped stairs
of shock and arraignment
holding the hand rails of a wheelchair
suitcase
packed away in a life

Down I-37
into the ochre autumn fallen down leaves
and left memories behind
their green Syphilis eyeglasses

weeping tumuli
recalcitrant
mulish, furrow of beast and beyond

yelling, screaming, howling
at the prurient puerile tilling
of sheets

****** the voices of words
and vomiting the mind into the pockets of the turbulent perambulations
expelled from meat-packing
whispering condescension
and coercing adolescent obsessions
with fame, glamour, and *****

Creeping out into the naked
light of the Darger scale janitorial
closets, carrying the notorious gowns
of red wine spells, backpacks, and pins

henchmen, plaintiff, and youth

All the while
ripping at the incantations of the soul
whispering ribbit and alfalfa
in the guard-rail scars
of the dawns decadent forgotten

She had stopped crying.
All evening in her black-mesh coup de voodoo.
On the plane she had been crying
For her Summer pal. Yesterday she had been to market
Big brown bags and white bags, little pink bags filled with crimsony scents,
Capricornia, looseleaf newsprint, postcards, and colored pencils,
She had hands full of handles, bags bundled, stitched in strict Saturday fashion.
He could barely break a step, he could fake dance with her feet on his tip toes.
She was only three quarters the perfect size to fit inside his frame.
The grand disappearing act. And she was only ifs and suicides.
A stranded ray of sun-draped hair on a cooly porcelain forehead, the segments were all just wrong,
Something so wrong, trembling heart cries over a mute coo through a flattened tongue.
The sickle tongue, dodgy on Tuesday's, She had a simple mug, oh! But so cute and soothing, the nape
That wrapped around, my arm lapped its hands in a clapping ginormous duck's bill!
Lapping rhythmically. Thwack! Thwack!
Like no crying I had ever heard. Nor Earthen beauty I had never seen.
Her little lamb legs lumbered over, her awkward thinness and long limbs spilt on top of her,
Her tiny shoulders searching for support from her hips. White aurulent doll head on a stick,
She had sad defeated eyes, whimpering, pathetic,
Too small, and she shuttered and she shook,
And she shivered out every teardrop her body ever made. And she fell back on her bottom, and looked
Up as if to see a white steed standing with her guy striking a poised hand down to her,
He split down the middle, stammering, broken pieces of words crumbling out of his mouth
With eager intentions. He was too weak
To give her his feet, or pull her up in, he hadn't the gumption. He was fully occupied standing,
He wept too; then shuffled a little
Towards where she had fallen. He knew she wasn't right
She couldn't get the devil out of her piercing blue pupils, she couldn't
She lied.
Then she just piled on top of her knees and fumbled as if to rise like a demure lamb trying to rise off its Newborn legs, she just curled her legs,
So stiffly built, and narrow footed, built with such inequality to her siblings,
She got in the way of herself, a little lamb that could not manage.
Too whittled for him, he tried, he really tried, but three years had drained his strength, no real help.
When he sat her upright on her bottom, she opened her eyes, and for a moment smiled, grabbed for His hand but then after awhile she was lost, she lost interest, her pupils wandered.
He was orchestrating everything.
A real project, much more urgent and important. By nightfall she could not stand. It was not
That she couldn't smile or laugh or love, she was born
With everything but the will to live -
That cannot be destroyed, just like a love.
Melancholy was more important to her.
Life could not get her attention.
So she died, with her handles still in her hands, green grass stains her legs.
She did not survive another warm summer night.
And then he wept uncontrollably again.
"The wind is oceanic in the elms
And the blossom is all set."

2

The boy has come back
From the seashore, and atop the plateau.
The woes of women are like a genocide
In the morning, when the killing is over,
And the heat begins, and the bodies lie,
And stark life moves for its sobbing bones,
The curved women move with fire.
Father Father Father the girls
Are weeping, and crying and I cannot resist that gentle frailty
They are shucked in their skin suits rising from their soporific slumbers
In decadent leathers and frou frou dresses. They cling to bold faces,
Nothing can escape that cold crying of women weeping for their princes.
Blood-letting rage cannot overthrow the meadow from the pebble brook,
As a laden head bleats its tarnished tongue across a milky breast, it cannot
Escape the sounds of blue-stained teardrops cascading across the plains,
The sounds of woolbirds braying while their skins are sheared against the
Sluicing sound of water rushing through the flume.
All summer they have lamented, gorging on melancholy, tottering their cotton pyramid heads,
Shaking their cries in deliberation, bald skinny victim women screaming out!
Cotton-mouthed clams yaffing, hearts in panic, wholes of bodies clambering in a *** of woe.
They roost useless, pollard and wethered, jealous
Squinting out the last droplets of desperation from their eyes, screaming their mouths in awful
Togetherness, this cacophony of tortured tongue-song
They curdle the last notes of despair out under knotted breaths
With every inch of strength left inside them, they bray this way and that.
Their mothers scream out in wretched despair, ahhh!
On distant cliffs, on scrawny legs
Their stiff pain goes on and on in the September heat.
"Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,"
Whipped bodies toting wergeld on a shore.

The Day She Died

Was the gloomiest day of the new century,
The first of calamitous, unfortunate autumns to come,
The first dying breath from piceous lungs.

That was yesterday. Early morning, soft rime droplets
Frosted to every blade of grass, not like any other
Earlier June day we've ever had. In the deep twilight
The syzygy announced the moon and demoted the sun.

The Earth-crisp frost nuzzled snow droplets.
Black bands of ravens whipping. Martens littering
Fresh kills of red-eyed rabbits on stark white stale
Summer lawns. A fox grayed, its cold bones
Mapped by ravaged feasts. A possum prowling
In a spot of tawny light.

The concrete spread into a maze
Of black veins ripening in the acute niello
Destitution of its widening cracks,

And when the summer left
It left without her. It will have to accept,
In the paley dim light of this vengeful wilderness -
She is gone.
But for now the warmth has not returned but a naked, half-pomegranate
Rotten moon for us two.
And a great vacancy in our memory.

[on the verge of a cry]

Darling penguin,

you've brought me here yet again. whether we writers are on the page of paper, Moleskin, notebook, website, or smartphone, here again you have brought me. Having just lit another cigarette, drinks and drugs and smoke and music are in this place you've brought me with these ***** fingers pounding away into a bluetooth keyboard as the long lonely nights I've taken to find you melted away the keys of my computer ash and burnt plastic have taken to so many letters: H, command, I, R, and D too. I have a fixe and it won't be cured alone. I've been on so many lines and numbers, and I keep trying, and I'll tell you some people might consider these women absolutely marvelous, but to me, they too often prove to be nothing more than the hollow engravings of tales told too often, and where am I with you?

I'm cracking my knuckles again, and it's so ******* hot in here. Morphs, subs, percs, and oxys, pain and agonizing pain. And I'm growing a beard and mustache, very soft hair for you to nestle into when we move into the house in Evanston. I've been touching my lips with these ash stained fingertips drafting your lips upon mine, while the piceous nexus of this cold untouched skin shifts restlessly in the drear and yellow light of another sad and melancholy hour away from my arms around you, abreast and grinning with excitement, contentment, contagious glee. i bring my clean soft fingerds through the strands of aurulent glistening gold hair of yours and press my mouth into the crown of your head, the temples of your face, and your face presses into mine, and it's 1:41am and these eyes wander endlessly around this room ******* down carcinogens and poison, holes in these jeans, black denim tapered cut, your black leather studded cuff around my right wrist and the peace beads a wandering monk granted to me with a gold card and a bow while amassing friends in the herds of people gathered in line to go into Lollapalooza. I am brimming over with excitement, even for the taste of dog feces in the cigarettes(I will brush of course), you are my event horizon, my vessel of light beams, lasers, and the most immense love for which of course more than a dozen different writings attempt to share with others and imbue the world to even come close to the extraordinary magnanimous love and adoration unto the both of us, but between ourselves especially.

Earlier this evening I was speaking to Elizabeth on the propensity of how valuable having a soulmate really is, not to say the words but to know the person, to know you in the full grace and integrity of what that means. I was saying how with you, there is no one or many or anything about you that disturbs me or that I could find gross or that could keep me from wanting to be close to you. That no matter how sick you could get or **** it- what I was saying is that I love you so much I want you to spit in my mouth, smear every part of your body against every inch of my body. I want to smell, taste, touch, and see all of you that there is, to sit again and stand again and stand up and sit down just ******* staring forever in the most beautiful enchanting, ethereal, and beloved face I have ever seen. And if I must I would carry you over molten lava, burning steel, broken glass, but instead I think we ought to go to Half Moon Bay, and while the chill is in the air, and it's just you and me my love, we can dance in the surf and kick the water at each other. Because the continental plates will always be moving, the water will move to grow and surge and swell and turn to clouds and back to raindrops and precipitate life and govern this planet, but I will always be governed by our amatory interconnectedness and how perfervidly passionate and over the top I am and always will be about you. I will give the world to you, so long as I can love you for as long as I live.

I will never remove you from my brain's synapses altogether,
Particles, dust-speckles, piceous ashes of you, broken half of
Where the crowning splinter lies.
Heffalump-bray, Big-bird whistle, and feverish laughter
Sink from your tiny lips.
It's worse than preschool television programming.

Maybe you consider yourself a god.
Mouth-rush, crooked sickle-spine, of the cranes' dead oath,
Or like some hindered devil at the reeds on your tongue.
Seven years I have worked with the crutch, and worried

Like arc-lightning, thickly-paned, frail as a frostbow,
Palely lit uvula at the glowing alter.
I am none closer now. To amend the acres where my feet wallow blindly.
The shivering, baroque, tumuli where my splinters clear my steel-hide.

An orchestral bow of crimson blight,
I had dredged supinely through the pithy Latin vowels.
Like the month of a flower, hitched to the acanthine wings of a moth.
The moon clung to your shivers and sickness.

No longer can I keep my hair to frosty old anarchies.
Nights, heaped on the bowels of a smoky weir.
The blank stones that struck my hands of warning.
Beside the clogged, rancorous doom I had reflected

You know me better than I, better than I know myself; you know me like I want to, like I was my own world's father. A famous goddess, parishioners won't say her name, I wrote letters to her personally, but was never brave enough to greet face to face. There's a type of prose, only intimate partners dare to go, where adjectives take verbs in rounds, and lovers sing each other songs. I've you and you have me, I'm captured by you so lovely, there's nothing I wouldn't do, good or bad, I'd ****** for you- a great vegan harvest, all of everything for my love the goddess.

In a world worshiped by false idols,
Where musicians and actors are modern day deities and neon signs flourese divine promises in magazines and the televangelist newscasters inject the masses with fear and false promises.
Opiated zombies take to the streets and go about their lives sleeping with eyes wide open at screens that have more meaning than their banal lives. But I woke-up long ago looking at the photo of your limitless azure eyes through a photograph. Long before I met you, I knew that one day our paths would cross and we would drive through the desert, deserted towns listening to Townes van Zandt and other musicians that most have only heard of through top 40 covers of their soulful songs.

The cacophony of coyotes, pumas, rattlesnakes and rabbits darting to and fro, in front of our headlights as quartz crystals reflect the full moon light, and Joshua Trees dance beneath the stars while we talk about Morrison, Harrison, Hendrix and the impact they have had on our lives. While most are drunk or dreaming, we are living the ultimate dream. I cannot wake-up to a world without you there-

Beside me and a space pig curled up asleep on the backseat as we trek across the Milky Way.

I smell the fires, their noisome stench fills my nose with the harsh turpentine and piceous smoke, but in the night we cannot see the trees. This fire could be right off our balcony. It could just be a neighbor's barbecue. How can people enjoy eating burnt and coal-battered meat? Your Uncle's neighbor apparently enjoys street meat. He killed a tick-covered deer, while he rode his scooter over the pass at night, and lied, he said he hunted it with his bare hands. Why must men and women and people lie, as if their stories capture more attention if they don't share what actually happened.

Dear you, I love you so. More and more with each passing day, I just hope one day we'll both leave this place, and share our final breaths in the same Earthen place. I promise you I'll share my final resting place so long as it's in a grave. I worry you'll want someone to spread your ashes, on a ski run in Aspen. Can we pretend small creatures live inside our walls, and rule a kingdom somewhere on our second floor, where Fraggles scramble to complete construction, on a network of tunnels.

I told you I would re-propose to you every day, I love you more than words can say. It's unquantifiable, just look beneath my eyelids. There's a man who used to share the hash he smoked, in a cove, somewhere in Venice, where the locals met us.

I'd drink and quaff your humanness, the pulchritude I cannot resist. The splendor you exude in all the passions you choose to do.

Hey you, if you find me here. Let me know if I'm still alive. I've made a wish to live, and be the father of your kids. We sing and laugh and sway, we eat apples and honey and pray, to an invisible god that could disperse all our flaws. And this moon, the one that has shone itself on empty roads, ignites the stars and stares at us shattering this cold. You were made in the image of life, I've been incommunicado but connected your dots. I wish I could color you by numbers, and count the hours we've slumbered.

There's cold-weather dripping from my nose. Where howling wolves and coyotes go. Where elk canter and mule deer pass, and a small boy moose named Bullwinkle waits for his mother to come back. Here is where the spotted marten eats from a rotting corpse, maybe it's a small naked shrew, it's map lines strewn across this town, where tourists think they know us, but they don't know my goddess.

Hey love, I'll never leave you alone. I'll never go to bed before you arrive home. I try and try not to yell, or even raise my voice above the evenings sounds. Do you hear the moose stepping on the frost-laden grass? It must have been starving for it to come this far. I'm learning now I know more about nothing, which I prefer to knowing something.

My hands won't put on the show, I told you I thought I knew. I prefer to be going down, so long as you'll always be around. I could count ten seconds until I realize my sentence. Poor birds fall out of the trees, there wings must have been freezing. I wait for you and I wait for your words. Your heart is made from all the things, I've only recently realized I've seen. Together, forever more. I take my hat off and hold open the door, I kiss your neck and eyelids and enjoy our shared silence. Keep me and never go away, you're worth more than the sky may lead, or the oceans breathe. I won't step, I won't speak, or breathe. Dear goddess, you're the only one I need. I need no one but you. I only need to know that you need me too. And one hour our shadows will meld together, while we wait outside freezing as we wait for summer.

But each season holds its own magic,
A seasonal  zeitgeist where we create our own traditions that supersede the Hallmark holidays that our oligarchies have created to lead people astray from the cohesive love and communal celebrations that our predecessors revered.
Yet each moment is a cause for celebration for you are a part of my life. I cannot wait to call you my wife.

From the moment I awake and feel your warm morning breath on my chest,
I breathe in the perfume of you and kiss you gently on the forehead as you hug me closer and face nuzzle me more deeply.
Each day, more perfect than the last.
I fight sleep because life with you is more splendorous than the culmination of all of my dreams. A symphony and an endless sonnet, fairy tales cannot come close to telling the story of our love.

You show my fingers where to go on the electric guitar strings of the mahogany fretboard of the guitar you gave me for my birthday.
My hands are slowly learning how to the play the notes and lyrics that I conjure in my mind. I cannot wait to play the songs that you inspire my soul to play. We shall sing together - a melodic harmony of a quixotic ambrosia that accompanies the vibrations of my guitar strings filtered through guitar pedals and amplified in warm undertones by the Fender tube amp.
Your bass line keeps pace with the heartbeat of the song as our voices go on
Singing the songs of our adventures
As leather wearing vegans and expedition smokers.

We smoke Marlboro Red Labels to pay homage to our Americana heritage,
As we drive the Prince of Darkness to foreign lands in search of crystalline moments to write, paint, create and sing about the dream we live everyday.
The dream I live with you my dear
,is the one I never want to awake from.

Not now, nor past, nor future shall anguish
Prevail in piceous depths betwixt Hell
And Heaven bright whence He shall dwell,
Despotic, casting voices to perish
Where I, in sombre woe, conceive visions
Of His tyrant reign. Grotesque agony
Has been wrought by His seat, high, joyfully
Quaking the decrepit Earth. Gaily
Does His crown manacle our once free Souls.

From death once wrought verisimilar chimes
Of a nation brought to glory’s righteous
Heart, but now pharaonic cries tread grim
From the Second with such semblance of high,
Righteous Sovran and now hath released His
Ministers of Vengeance upon us whole.
In atramentous grief, descrying the
Bright cynosure in golden sleep beckon,
The Heav'nly Muse my soul does possess.

Me, up on the snow-rock white glacial cliff hedges mountaineering my way in the moments-after-twilight-sweeping-black. Execrable cold, a death-making quiet, Not a seal, not a hare - this Earth of gelid death. I climbed out above the snow Where my expiration left sinuous brandings in the copper light. But the Weddell was siphoning the darkness to the katabatic deep valleys - piceous lees of the brightening umber - cleaving the moon in two like the split eye of a winter lynx. And I saw the penguins: Little specks of black in the limitless white - fifty together - obelisk-still. Their inaudible coo, they sat motionless, nearly mute, With creamsicle feet and amber-eyes, incomparably mum. I proceeded: not one chirped or swiveled its little fur cap. Black silent fragments of a black silent world. I hearkened in the barrens of the desiccate plains. While the wooly bears came from the sea to see of the silence. Slowly edges oozed out of the darkness. Then the moon ivory, porcelain, azure erupted Quietly, and halving to its heart and shot mist, shaking and the ocean opened, crying blue, And the giant mountains lunged-. I stopped Scrambling, as if up from my voice at the mouth of a nightmare, down towards the snow-rock, from their glacial sheaths, And came the penguins. There stood they, still-, silent, in the river of blue light: Creamsicle feet and amber-eyed Thwacking the ice in a grand fête While everywhere was gray and rimy. And still they did not speak above a breath, Not one squeeked or cawed, Their nestled shining beaks dug into the polar rim, Low into the valleys, in the blue shimmering rays - In throngs of the congested cities, living among the years, the faces, May I some day greet my memory in such solemn a world Into the estuaries and the azure-skies, curious wooly bears, Listening as the ice tholes.

Me, up on the snow-rock white glacial cliff hedges mountaineering my way in the moments-after-twilight-sweeping-black. Execrable cold, a death-making quiet, Not a seal, not a hare - this Earth of gelid death. I climbed out above the snow Where my expiration left sinuous brandings in the copper light. But the Weddell was siphoning the darkness to the katabatic deep valleys - piceous lees of the brightening umber - cleaving the moon in two like the split eye of a winter lynx. And I saw the penguins: Little specks of black in the limitless white - fifty together - obelisk-still. Their inaudible coo, they sat motionless, nearly mute, With creamsicle feet and amber-eyes, incomparably mum. I proceeded: not one chirped or swiveled its little fur cap. Black silent fragments of a black silent world. I hearkened in the barrens of the desiccate plains. While the wooly bears came from the sea to see of the silence. Slowly edges oozed out of the darkness. Then the moon ivory, porcelain, azure erupted Quietly, and halving to its heart and shot mist, shaking and the ocean opened, crying blue, And the giant mountains lunged-. I stopped Scrambling, as if up from my voice at the mouth of a nightmare, down towards the snow-rock, from their glacial sheaths, And came the penguins. There stood they, still-, silent, in the river of blue light: Creamsicle feet and amber-eyed Thwacking the ice in a grand fête While everywhere was gray and rimy. And still they did not speak above a breath, Not one squeeked or cawed, Their nestled shining beaks dug into the polar rim, Low into the valleys, in the blue shimmering rays - In throngs of the congested cities, living among the years, the faces, May I some day greet my memory in such solemn a world Into the estuaries and the azure-skies, curious wooly bears, Listening as the ice tholes.