The words above the door
replicated and smeared
themselves along the wall.
With one stroke, I saw
what drugs decades before
revealed in delusion:
For a surety,
our projections turn
back proffering chains.
Yet, no chains exist beyond
our myopic visions;
the earth begins and ends
with a whisper, with a shout,
with inarticulate gargling
(May 15, 2018).
by
My mouth is my wound,
a stigmata of broken teeth
and words. My tongue’s slashed
like ribbons flapping
in the mountain’s wind.
My prayers snap violently
into the icy air’s silence.
I don’t know what to do
now: swallow my own
blood, and drown; or spit
my life onto the ground
to call forth a bitter
beast which I fear
will devour me whole?
(May 11, 2018)
The days and nights pass
in calm acquiescence. As
expectations lurk without
patience, sad laughter slips
into conversation’s pauses.
We each drink to avoid the
silent ramifications: there’s
nothing to say; and, what’s said
means nothing. A stock phrase
spills from a stock question
in a communal recitation.
Only empty gestures remain
to conjure, with a hollow
dance, the clichés of love.
(May 10 2018)
The tree grabs the light tight
against its lithe branches,
a quick embrace, then release
into the slow evening air,
like a child running to her mother,
hugging her in affirmation,
then dancing away in delight.
(May 10, 2018)
I have no shadow,
it faded like cloth
in the sun.
Light passes through me,
no wall marked
with my absence
to imply a presence
now lost in light.
I sweep my footprints
from the trail
like gardener monks,
leaving all behind.
Not knowing how to fly,
I walk close to the ground
between pulsing shadows;
condemned to watch
the butterflies flit
above the flowers
blooming in the sun.
(May 9, 2018)
We peel back skin’s layers
as if caressing a book’s
tissue thin pages,
each bit of viscera
detailed.
I tell a story
to make myself whole—
so many revisions to go.
In corners,
the old murmur softly,
placing the past
back into an order
extent only in dream,
which none of the young
care to hear.
(May 8, 2018)
Repetition runs counter to chaos.
The steady tap-tap declares one
to be; it belies the random
scratch upon the prison wall.
Only for a moment one rises
above the skitter of rat’s feet
through dry straw to say it
again: I am here, I am here.
Too often ritual’s condemned
as too difficult a constraint
to work within. Yet, there is no
freedom in the sun’s fire and fusion.
Freedom’s found in the patterned
improvisation of predictability.
(May 7, 2018)
by
You were a dream, as was she,
but neither of you were the dream.
She kept shifting from dark to light.
Both of you were, simultaneously
light and dark, entwined like lovers
tangled in a kiss. He watched, intrigued
and somewhat guilty, as if a voyeur
peering through bedroom blinds.
The dream kept returning to you
and her together, but not together;
separate in your costumes and colors:
red and black lace against warm skin;
a part of the ambient background
reasserting itself again into day.
He woke often, then returned to you,
in the dream, with her. The dream
turned the morning back into itself,
until where each of them left off vanished,
like promises which were never made.
(May 7, 2018)
by
“. . . . . . . . . . I want in the heaps of rubble
at last to hear my voice again
which was a howling from the very start”
–Ranier Marie Rilke
The flailing screams
have been left behind;
most days now, I speak
with a calm bitterness.
My anger’s directed inward
toward my personal failings
more than to worldly disdain.
No longer like the nascent shock
of a newborn’s confrontation
with the air, I write now
in a desperate determination
to witness the insidious lies
I tell myself to survive
the language of the ruins.
(May 3, 2018)
by
She infused your words with hers
as you did not say what she intended.
The words in the letter in the dream
swirled and slipped across the page.
You began to read like a film voiceover,
then her voice became stronger erasing
your words as she spoke your confession.
You knew she knew you knew she wrote
to you she thought; but was unsure
the letter, your letter, her words said
as much. If only she did not know
the letter, as her desire, was a dream;
and no amount of bland exposition
could explain away her obsessions.
(May 2, 2018)
by
A deep resonance in waves
flows through my walls
as if they did not exist;
and, I am set atremble
like the wings of a butterfly
on a bit of Queen Anne’s Lace.
Thus fear inculcates the normal
day to day rituals, casually,
like friends meeting for lunch.
I cannot control my shaking.
I have become thin glass
singing in harmony
with the tremulous cacophony;
until I shatter like ice.
(April 29 2018)
by
As years
of protective layers
ignited, then fell
away into ash,
the first
puff of air
from your lips
slipped through
my divisions
like water spilling
over earthen levees,
until I drowned.
(April 29, 2018)
by
embers, embedded
beneath the snowy ash, burn
slowly, secretly.
(April 29, 2018)
by
I stand beneath layers
of my sedimentation,
as if the very air
has turned to silt
settling to the sea floor.
I know no tendency
toward an escape
beyond a calm acceptance
of the fossil formed
from what used to be me.
A configuration shaped
to a shell implies a notion
of what it once meant to be
a creature alive in the sea.
(April 25, 2018)
“Nearby, in the gutter,
common wisdoms
still wriggling.”
–Paul Celan
The remains of old ideas,
ripe with anger, are
so deeply embedded
one breaks bones
only to find dust,
instead of marrow.
They raise their heads,
and laugh righteously
at their bitter lies.
Always, they wait nearby—
truncheons polished,
jackboots shined;
While common wisdoms
smile like the recent dead.
(April 24, 2018)
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