O’er the flightless idris of my youth, none
Flummoxed and flagellated my marrow
Further than the viscous, viscid barrow
Of the stillborns vernix hide, dun and hoar,
Donne and done before, ‘twixt the loins which bore
It’s arachnid soul. I am still obsessed,
Tossed ‘twixt the marble pyre and the undressed
Obscenity of virgin womanhood.
The obstinate verse, child- Is there good
In every man? Perhaps, tinctured, where stood
A far greater, infinitely greater
Man of fewer words. Hapless- much later
There became time for all but to explain
Which heartbeat switched a consonant in swain-
‘My darling, there is but a fickle heart
Betwixt murder and making love. I part
Ways with lovers like a cigarette smoked
To its yellow stump. Alas! I once hoped
For ardor to pass its swallow hand from
Tree to tree.’ E’er the eyes of time cast some
Poltergeist in the dreary stillicide,
Some apparitions bitter sleuth of chide
Fingering my window panes. Know I now
The sly gust which drives the chaff, drives the brow
Unto its shy cocoon. How fey! I at rest,
Found a feather tucked into your breast
And the gold vermeil, in its shudder veiled
The tawny conifer. The luna sailed,
So suddenly, across the orchard of
Apple brassiere and raspberry nape. Love
Sheds the darndest hides, to expose the sea
Of innards where vultures feast, should I flee
With a glance at an imagined hourglass,
A watch drooping o’er my wrist. I, alas,
Cannot see who it is who stares ‘twixt chink
And eye. The mirror strikes oddly, I think
I am obsolete; an orbicle glints
Up at me from inside my clogged drain, rinse
And repeat. Cut rinse and repeat. Night since
The eve of twin illusion- I have seen
The voices of shivering specters gleen
Their hoary verses alow the streetlight.
Ere desertion of my lover, twilight
Lay its broad billows slowly ‘pon midday
And formed a dusk of firefly live fire. May
Is but the lancing tongue of summer’s kiss.
June begins at the back of the throat. This
Grave quietude invokes the many eves
Of our demise, the limber oiléd sheaves
Of mechanistic gibbets. Many noons
Have charred sienna born by autumn moons
Where ‘neath the shady bower, tendrils spread
The touch of seraph o’er the weeping head.
As fife and fleece are mirrored in the lane
Of high seraph, apparitions ‘neath the mane
Of froth alow the jack of union ships-
Like a needle in vein, I touched her lips.
Again demure this spheroids horrid tick
Revolving the merciless heretic
Of time in dual daze, slowly wrenching, too
The nautilus night with its scarlet hue.
See the callous bark of e’er waking trees
Falling from the canopy to the knees
And swallowing a sweet midsummer mist
Betwixt the body and the simple gist.
See the long eared rabbit, its manic feet
Running a steel gauntlet from street to street,
See fate reflected in the flashing eyes
As we must all meet death before the skies.
Death is enlightenment, some thinkers hope
Though no frail gabber knows, no pres or Pope
Can say for sure, but I know, my dearest
The I in die coruscates the clearest
When your by my side, I knowest for sure
Your most lucid presence amongst the blur
I know what fools proclaim of what can stay
But who cares what dumb sons of bitches say?
Nothing can stay and can it once be true
One can unstrangle words once strangled blue?
What was it then, a subatomic boom
That fin’lly left a shade beyond the tomb?
Across the chamber, the unstringed guitar
Rests like a waxless candle, there a star
Of feathered drywall where the bovine head
Has picadored its resting place. The bed
Is not made, it remains as strangely kept
As when we ruffled it’s sheets. The inept
Portrait of a rose from a departed
Lover rests on the nightstand, imparted
As a get well gift. The cinnabar
Coils neatly weep, thoughts of lead, skin and tar
Weigh them to the base of what has withered,
Feigned and withered once more, she who shimmered
Upon the pavement lay entranced in coin
For one whores tip is twice tin to the groin.
Ah! Curse me! Write a note and slip it under
A lions foot. Dream to drink, to dance and wonder
How we could have huffed heather horns and Christs
Drowning in the shallow ends of dykes
After long nights of forgetting the past;
Ah! Pre notioned forevers’ never last.
Unwrap this bandage with a reel of film
And drive this headless body by the helm
Of spudless spine and ever grateless glean
To disguise the wails of this cantilène
In flawed grandiloquence, to engrave
The last bits of hope on a poetic grave.
My love, I kiss you frankly one last time
And abate thy vexes for the e’er sublime.
Let awe drown my nights in ale! How can one
Flee paradise? Free fall through a kiss? None
Have grown old, only fainted through a pane
Of stained glass, plunged beneath another plane
Of cartilage and sinew and black stone.
I was delivered ‘twixt a beastly moan,
‘Twixt black magi stuffing posies in their
Double barrelled nostrils, ‘twixt the strayed air
Of Faust’s malcontent, vernix twinned in ash
And ‘twixt the crossroads, draped in brimstone sash
A crossdresséd beezlebub strutted ere
My svelte and supple countenance, where
The lampstands carnal apogee entranced
The crowd in strobe and smutty naiads danced
Amongst the sundered dams of frothy smiles,
And between the revelry and the wiles
Lay the reeling head, drunk and two days stale,
So that the air of stink and stagnant ale
Revolted the nearest sober nostril,
While amongst the crowds, the cranked apostle
Snorted a Delphic breeze and mourned the last
Cannon ball to break the Mnemonic mast,
Which snapped songs in goldfish revolution.
Dunce and drink reeled in perpetual motion
While sticky locks appealed to synapses
Their crooked trolley hops and kinky keys
To denim shorts and primrose Pyrenees
Which tripped along invisible snags,
And in the menagerie of slags,
I too sauntered; an intemperate droll,
Who in his lovely youth, found alcohol
As an indulgence rather than a cope,
And perceived the bustling bongs of hope
As the greater nepenthe. What virtue
Dies in the hearts of boys! A florid hue
Nestled on my shoulders, a wobbly stride
Spun me through the savannah, while my pride
Of fellow parchéd lions searched for truth
In distilléd life, the elusive booth
Of clean refreshment, where in malt heat stilled
The fresh sacraments and the chalice filled
With the holiest drink a stream had e’er milled.
Water water, clean and fast! To drunken
Dilly dallies and the hoar of sunken
Eyes, suddenly glow as the holy ghost,
And nearly lose their suppers at the toast
Of one more glass of ale. At last we found
An oasis in the desert, where sound
And song and shiver grew silent to throng
The wildebeest gulping, the sloshing song
Of a drunken herd lapping up the cold
Vitality long from our spirits sold.
It was at this device that I, dipping
My head into a furrow and sipping
The cool strands of life, heard at my back
A plush voice sputter some endearment at
My figure, doubled over a manger
As if Mary had miscarried. Stranger
Was it that, through my wanderings, I had
Lost all tether to the Earth, as if plaid
And sundanced skin had no doubt given me
A brain fever of the harshest kind. Deeply
Affected by this voice, Gabriel-esque
Nearly calling ‘do not be afraid!’, dressed
In the most sonorous cadence, yet still
Soft as silk, quiet as a hamsters wheel
Squealing and squeaking, weeping as it seemed,
I turned in clueless stupor and was beamed
With my double rendered darling, the two
Figures of equal grace, united through
A wink, where at once I saw, the burlesque garb
Of my sirens shawl, and with poise, the barb
Of stingray and scorpion struck me dumb
And danced my soul to the inoculum
Of loves first wince, when at a drop I saw
The dreads of sappy drool and pious pall
Bleached as if struck with unbearable light,
And as Moses gazing at His back, white
In insufferable awe, reuniting God
And fallen man, and with a messy shod
Greeting fields of Elysium, as a
Conqueror rather than an émigré.
Ere fauns and satyrs, here I shall pay mind
To the grounds of the lady’s wistful mein
For unto the tick of our sole arrest
The tender woman wept, beating her breast
In a drunken venom, marching beyond
The trite enchantments of the souls abscond
And found cheer only in the smoke that beat
From the beguiling puffs of ganjan treat.
Why did she stare so sullen? Why, had she
Tripped o’er sorrow and spilled her ruck of glee?
How was she so fair, while e’er plagued with woe?
While I digress, I must forewarn thee so
That though her stormy head reaped but clouds of gray
Ne’er did she cease to bleed the nebulae
Of saw and stun in exquisite brilliance,
And amidst the haze, a near seraphic stance
Shrouded her in dreams, vatic nonetheless,
And swathed her soul in immutable dress.
What droll and dross would assault one so fair?
Crooked as a cock who thinks himself a mare,
Born of blithe guts and Myronian prick
And chiseled from stone in iniquitous shtick,
This Herculean, all blasé and brawn
Striding as if he bore no bulge, as fawn
And doe may grace a field in abnormal ease,
So did he live amongst abnormal sleaze
Plastering, as a young man of two and one
The star spangled hymens of the young wanton
For it is here that we find her sullen fume,
As in an early adolescent loom,
The plowman entwined furrow and fallow
And in her fifteenth year, felt the shallow
Farm fare of an agricultural steel
Wrenching curtly through the virginal seal.
I love it when the flawless strips of white
Keratin- grace the anxious canines bite!
I envy, when the wan starhusk wittles
The truth of your bald heart down to kibbles
And bits of eternity, breaking down
The character of love in kisses, drowned
Beneath the waves of ennui, insipid lust
Resting in the bower, shedding the dust
Of every false intention feigning to be
The everything for you and you for me.’
Every vessel, every stagecoach, let us
Adjourn asbestos ‘fore the fatal dust
Settles in our minds and hymns and mail
Dribbling the salt of rage upon the snail!
See sister, must my iron vault, perforce,
Be alimony in my God’s divorce?
Not yet, must I, consumed by ebon thoughts,
Return to stage refrocked in all my faults!
Rebetting, dear stallion, on a flight
Around the spectres of interned twilight
To modulate this phistic ledge for two,
Confusing up from down and missing you!
Often have you failed to write, for birthdays,
Christmas, Amber’s death, new years smokey haze
And my countenance is cloaked in hatred
For you, which in a poem dated
April eighteenth, I describe the feeling
As ‘the silence of Gods implored healing
Lulling beyond the death of a mother.’
Though heaven knows, in some portrait, some other
Moment where nakedness strips away
The laughless gloom of autumn’s solstice, gay
Inflections from beyond the noontime veil
Clothe falcon in the cerements of quail
And but a voice, a photograph, a song
Will destroy the vizard of rancor, long
For your phantom to flounce, return to me
Over dream and death, to the dogwood tree
Where the blossomed shade would forever nurse
The psychopompéd puppy in your purse.
Daffodils walk on water, the street where
Two ebon summers past I met you there!
Stricken blind as Saul, how foolish! what feat!
I met my god whilst walking on this street.
A flaccid trampoline now rests upon
The grass, where the sylph of a violet dawn
Greets its ruddy face, coddled in a wave
Of subtle phosphorescence, like a slave
Unsure of what to do after a freak
Emancipation. Suddenly I peek
Over the rubble, the pedantic dust,
The silence, the marble fountains, the rust
Of habitation two years dead. I am
But a wraith, three fifths equal to a lamb
Of midmorning fleece. Just now I espy
A sheen of cerulean in the eye
Of shy dawn. An inferno reignites
Within the still insistent shades of night.
It’s been what? a fortnight? a year? The days
So often mirror here! A sullen maze
Persists betwixt present and present past.
Cinders of ardour shroud the mind. The last
Time we kissed could have been by lips of stone!
Groping hands of bronze! How could I have known
The indices of every clockwork blade?
The molting tongues of solitude, the shade
Of relapse falling from my ecstasy?
My darling, you have aged quite recklessly!
What smiles from the pink fin of your tongue? Boto
Toying fancily! The spectres swarm, though
The lilies are sprouting from your eyes. Mind
The noise fair creatures! Plotting soot behind
The ninth chimney, will the coal miscarry
It’s little smoggy blessing? I tarry.
Do not mind what dribble spurns thy semblance,
Thy tobacco ears, the key to balance
Is a motor skill in each hand!
Deny
The opals sheen and shimmer, let me lie
Affixed the thornbush of my aftershock.
Some words must faint, one cannot pick a lock
By mere benevolence, blushing its steel
Cheeks to the limber of the forge. The real
Romance lies beneath the garden, caressed
By the lily roots, fingered and undressed
By the parasites of passion, stripped bone
To bone in some macabre oral rapture,
Blood and pilfered tear; dear ribcage capture
The maggots of my pessimistic heart-
Recapitulate- crash, hemorrhage, restart
My wretched, hand crank soul. Behold! The field
Of sentience and cinnamon, where yield
The waters of her hind width humble eyes
Scourged in basins of hazel. I descry
The apparitions near, no longer mourning
For bright bones and billows braise the morning
Pining for the eve of April, where the dead shall march
And the coliseum shall be rebuilt, arch by arch.
Garland o’er her feeble form, breathliss still
As the cool waters undertake. The will
Of fate hath sundered ere each hymens grip,
Where her hyaline mold spread lip to lip
The mauven tongues of innocent disgrace.
Remember his cold touch, his clenchéd face-
I am sure you are happy, sure you are
Preening silver tongues, my odalisque, far
From unfathomable griefs which clouded
The brined instruments of self undoubted.
Nay. I was the plastic sheath betwixt the edge
Of bare vein- run your hand along the wedge
Of your illium- the thin lips, they spake
The words of my insomnia- partake
In my sacraments, palpate every rill
Do they mutter your past secrets? All still
Crawling noisily from in the wood you flee?
I was still prone to shock ere you met me!
Though now I sew the mask of seraph ‘pon
The sow, believing it to swiftly dawn
A watchers wing. Believe me now, I ride
The wake of lunar floods, beyond the tide
Of ebon koi, which flee at the first sight
Of the nereids bare breast, yet dream of tight,
Viscid fleur fazing o’er flame and phantasm,
Mating with the eddies, the orgasm
Unable to match thy forbidden bliss.
O’er the craven elixirs, o’er the kiss
Of tween lips, something, someone slipped, panting
Beside thy salmon mouth, necromancing
The cusp of thy ear with most gentle nips.
The clock clicked its tongue, a hand across her hips
Stopped suddenly to palpate those pink rills.
A hush. But a laugh did dispel such ills
As he continued his so gentle thrust.
Ever a kiss did he despair? Thy musk
Of apricot and lavender knew no
Embrace but that of chafing silk below
The squawking sigh of virgin belabor.
The one who samples knowledge must know more-
Alas! As do I know these damning truths
Cajoled from thy mouth, thy languished hue, ruths
Iron maiden setting its stilettos
Betwixt each rib, whilst broad set dynamos
Tarry from room to room, engaging in
Slick back and forths with the highfalutin
Elites who tumble through the corridors
Drinking bongs of champagne. The many scores
Of tressled gowns forked inside the svelte legs
Move silently and conversate. The dregs
Of love hath thrice forked my soul, I am bare
By undergarments, splitting looks ‘twixt their
Many amorphous faces, whirling like
Fleshen eddies, slurring crossroads by strike
Of an octangular nail. Have you graced
The euphoria of a supple thorn?
Thy fingernails, thy chamber helix worn
By the customary fit of scratches,
Chained redundancies in crystal thatches?
Affection affliction ascension time
We are the many stones that stand in line
To die like souls and stars-
To death redawn
To die and reach a mountain stream to spawn,
To fly recurse, throw off this pious cowl
Spell check an oath and turn this fuck to fowl,
And we were so brash as to rack a rose,
To take a tern, fly old winter by the nose
And were we then so cruel, as to make
A thoughtless mirror of the world opaque
Were you then so cruel
As to brand your cattle with a kiss?
Though I am the fool for he who
Points into a mirror, finds himself points back.
Dry rose of rigamortis, have one fresh
And knit a white bouquet of flesh.
Plant a sword and grow a pistil, make anew
The words we strangled blue.
Such as this one where she stares, and not to say
Stares but observes the play
Of possum, where servants of regret
Imbibe the blasphemes of the epithet
And observe four fingers pointing back
To reach the G spot in God, the black
Or rather, let us say ‘the worm’
Or the apple or what is equal to the term
Unrequited, where we say
The apple is unequal to the urn
Or yet again, another way
Of saying that all illusions are equal truths
Which makes me wonder
Who sewed the curtain back together?
Do you remember
Those long nights
Where every strand of hair
Running through my hands
Was as equally innumerable as the nights
It took to separate
Each inseparable strand
From my aching hands?
God of lipless contusions
God of faultless fallacies
I am not your martyr!
I am not your martyr!
I am not your martyr!