Bones

Out by the side of the road
Ribs gleaming in the whitened sun,
The dead dog of purpose won't
Give up its ghost.

It just lies there,
Waiting for a heavenly host
To come and carry it away
A white mile marker, propping

Up the day, a billboard hoax that
Gets in the way of the scenery,
Disturbing the greenery,
Promising travelers on.

Fortune, that invisible
Hand, strikes without warning,
Is impossible to decipher
With its siren blare, its

Big Six Wheel, its
Protocol of Random moments.
True culture is built
On reverence.

And Rumours Of Wars

As the black crow calls
And with such foreboding swoops
And lets fall its omen feather
At our feet, no sign from heaven
Could render as sweet this
Blackened quill which
Whittles defeat

For as the aim is followed through
It is the chance to defy the threat
Which summons the true
And truly I 've no oath for you
But this; when soft petal'd spring
Wilts from summer's kiss,
That our ancient pact remain
Under that scalding rain.

The test is certainty with
Conviction. To throw fully thwarted
Against hope into the stark naked sky
This our dream,
Carpe
Carpe Deum.

looking

the moon like an iris
coronas around in two tight circles
the air heavy and sweet
a moist breath.
inside, survivor.

i am on the inside, looking in.

i keep africa in a box in my
living room.

out of the corner of my eye,
a silverback
and his troop
move like streaks in the night.

tar pit

the branches seem to be getting
further and further out of reach,
but the sky is a lovely blue, and the
breeze is fresh and cool.

paper clip

if i could take a paper clip to your hazy grey eye, or is it blue? i can’t tell in this light- this dream’s in black and white, and slip it over the corners of all those days cupped into your vision like water in your hands, unable to contain or remain, are they pages or lives? – i can’t tell or never will, where even the birds have strangled their songs, clipped their own wings, and granite has taken root and spreads across the sky, where you and i both know the breeze is not the same, neither the rains, how they’ve shamed, taking on the city’s tears whose poison floats back and forth from what has spilled between heaven and earth for all these years, i’d mark the pages where you loved best for sun on rainy days.

14

disentangling my self

from the body of romance

arms and legs akimbo

learning to settle, like a visitor

to love’s embassy,

behind the tour guide

who speaks

in mediocre syllables of

the splendour of the mundane

hidden in the mountain

of its own necessity.

i could toss that mountain into the sea

with my one hand tied behind my back.

but would you last?

circumference

try as you may, you'll
not hear a thought
but in listening can know
its presence, ally or foe

out on the circumference,
sight dares a glimpse;
a trajectory is imaginary
until traversed

anyhow, the world is made
of assumptions, the length
and breadth of which
calculate the distance

between reality and
what is real. saying
the divine is not here
does not make it so.

diamond light

after so much pressure,

so much endurance

this vision of divine love

that creates a human being,

that makes a child of a slave,

bestows an inheritance

within a crust of bread.

"Bead Buttons, Brooms and Nails.."

Not unlike the notions I keep on the sill
Against the slow grind of a stealthy sun
Whose circles are brooms flying
Carving wrinkles in a traveling sky

I am a secret resistance, as a day
Standing upright in a wind tunnel
As Time drawing a bead on circumstance,
And the high art of chance

Moonlight Sonata

Having no place to remain, we place ourselves
within each other, in hopes to lengthen the brief moment
of translation when we understood the language,
conversed freely in joy.

Our hearts transcribe each other; signals of salutations,
the form of a dance we so roundly turn, its taffeta
and gloves, it's polish and cologne; it's ragtime and gin
reserved for some other region, not the heart
whose language is still pure.

It is a lie to think of a blackened heart, a phrase we use to
describe something else entirely, something lost, not found,
something out of order, deprived of grace; depraved, for
depravity is not of the heart. No, if we knew the heart,
we'd understand the shining city on the hill.

Because it is not of the moonlight's glow across the dance floor
that we speak, rather it is she who speaks of us, as if we were her all,
as if we were suns upon which her face depended for her features,
else how could she be known?

There is no independent gaze, only the reflection of a singular
intent, as though angels in their dissipation needed some air to travel through
to practice their appearances. Soft blades bend in breeze, hills of sand
grow into mountain ranges. Mountains carve into shapes that are erased.

God speaks with the stuff of numbers that combine in infinite formulae,
a pure language of gesture, best described by lovers.
Everything that gives light is dependent on that which makes it shine.

Liberty

Singing onward,

a dull ache inside

the inner ear,

and a neck grown

past its natural length

from peering over

uncounted generations

of stonework

in bone corsets and

shifting hemlines,

from ankle to mid-thigh

to the decorative crotch.

She is an anachronism

from a future levee,

a dike built to shelter

a rumoured cosmos.

dike: a bank of earth formed of material being excavated

easter

When it comes to truth, who wants to believe it when it means giving up that comfortable sound..

Bach's eagle

He sleeps in me,

and dreams.

I move in subtle ways,

lending an ear, an arm.

He turns restless, at times, then

restive, obtaining both peace

and journey.

Blossoms recede beneath new boughs

and occasionally, a gardener comes

with his shears.

Branches bend and slightly shiver after

the weight of fruit falling, its only sound,

or birds, their brief encounter

this feathered song that takes flight

from a cradled egg that breaks like night.

O how he told me, showed me, the heart is made

of sticks and twigs lined with fuzz from its own down.

"As the modulation rises, so may the King's Glory.."

Bach, Canon per Tonos

Replete

As a living soul, I am replete

with silences

for the sake of my own history,

the aphoristic body I lose

for a moment,

or these moments,

marked by our voices.

And the voices sing, no longer

at the mercy of language,

with the chorus of the land somewhere, someplace,

outside the story-choked scape.

Something is seen, but one

doesn’t know what

because they behave not like

bodies,

but like weightless thoughts.

Aceldama

I

“Who is my mother?”

All those galaxies ago, where I burned and practiced the cold flame

and mined the mirrored ore of apexes from

quantum peaks and wordless defiles,

I never had a name, because just when I think I know anything I am

reminded of doubt, and because I am reminded of doubt,

I must consider it as a possibility, because if God is one

for whom all things are possible, then of course it would follow, the

impossible sits in the palm of His hand, along with all possible

worlds and outcomes, beginnings, and maps to beginnings,

next even, to I myself, the trembling and blink of the not-yet-fledgling,

just pecked out from its shell. Is that my mother’s

voice I hear, calling or cawing?

I try to translate, but it is, after all, only sound, and in this emergence,

still contained in my own context, I can only hope

to agree with outside meanings. What if instead of Live,

she means Die? Or if “Come here, my love” means go to Hell? It seems

that her mouth moves, but her words are the gestures

of one flailing in an agony of departure, of a fear of severance

from all that is possible and good, of sickness in Fact,

and I, still damp and not having yet accumulated other choices with

which to compare, begin to gesture back, in the same

muted tones of fury cocooned in helplessness, a smile

being the first beseeching plea.

II

God says nothing, as fathers often do, but holds me there in His palm,

along with all that is impossible, and so, of course, I swoon,

believing this motion is time, and begin to feel the pull of it,

Newton’s apple falling from Eve’s hand, and enter the world of recondite

splendours, powered at the very least by clocks, placing one

inside my body, and picking up its cadence with my feet.

Soon, I am ravenously hungry, and the frigid air begins to warm, parading

in sheets like tasseled mirage, and I step out on my first quest, the

quest for Sustenance.

III

She was a surrogate, from whose body I hatched, and I starved on through

my youth, suckling finally in my late adolescence on

that verdant acclivity sometimes found by the grievous,

its approach being so discreetly occluded by Hope that most of the well-

meaning continue on their level ground, tilted, as it were,

by the phenomenon of aspiration, believing all the while

that they, in fact, ascend. Alas, poor Yoricks.

So it was that I was nursed, with the effervescing milk of Rare Fortune,

by a green and growing hillside, a tawny hillock in fall~

the alternate breasts I turned upon to take my fill

and I listened to the singing of her lullaby of bees and cockle shells,

her amaranth sighs and muguet bells, and then her swaying treefulls

of golden leaves, their rasp a fairer comfort than the punctuated

expectation, those sudden telegrams which increase rather than interrupt

such silence as my birdlegs, these animated twigs,

seem muffled within.

This rustling became a peaceful reassurance, like the white hems of motherly

underskirts after twilight, brushing softly the bedlinens,

leaning their rosemilk aroma over snoozing innocents

to outen wee nightlights,

to tuck, at last, the babes with prayers to see them through the dark, like notes

in a wailing wall, vast and black as night; mothers, all, eventually,

named Mary and mantled in steep blue myth, crowned

with the narrowest and most breathtaking spires of gold, set with philosophers’

stones, which initiates know as perfections of circles, revealed only

by the tips, the convergence of angles, of the great cornerstone.

IV

O Christ! Thou Instance of vertical flights, your moment a transmundane eternity

hidden in plain sight.

Raja Manna!

I raise my sandwiches to you, stain my lips with your wine! How my heart beats

its weird joy, delighted in its gilded cage, preening and warbling

along about the lilies of the fields, but for your gentle mercy,

Aceldamas, all.

My cocked head and my bird eyes, black as space to the blue between, spend the

day wondering if my perch swings me, or if I, by my weight

and movement, make it swing, for when I light upon it, it moves,

and I am fascinated, almost proud.

A·cel·da·ma ¹ (ə-sěl'də-mə)

In the New Testament, a potter's field near Jerusalem purchased by the Jewish priests as a burial ground for strangers with the reward that Judas Iscariot had received for betraying Jesus and had later returned to them.

Aceldama, lit. "place of bloodshed," from Gk. Akeldama, from an Aramaic phrase akin to Syr. haqal dema "the field of blood."

And So Romance

became the scorn of their happiness.

He courted Heart’s Desire, wooing, and

she, with full knowledge of what she was doing, fell down

into the down of his Cupid wings, insipid, insouciant,

implacable things, unfortunate pillows of delight

that as easily reassemble and take flight

leaving in eventuality, that complacent virtual reality,

a bland astonishment; the sad recognition of boredom,

the unromantic moments that misconstrue time.

Tending the garden, i slice my finger on a spade

my blood flows bright enough to decorate

the graying hour. Instead of ardor,

duty speaks, contains like a vase

the cuttings which will no longer

wilt in their ground.

Some i dry and keep around, reminders of

roots that grow deep somewhere,

pilfered by that sly scoundrel with his bow.

Tallow

What to eat? What to eat?

Down in the dark nest of the street

with news of the trumpet’s blare

drowned out by air and the mute

faces of coin rendering fat

from the alphabet for simmering sin,

faith’s antonym.

How does the tallow make light?

Comet

There was a nail in her pocket

taken from a cross, and across the street,

their bodies were dancing like human drums.

The night caught fire and took flight,

a comet burning across my eyes,

and through the long hallway left by its tail,

a trail of mothers standing in their doorways,

watching children leap across millennia like fences,

to land casually on this day with its

six silver discs, glinting in the sun.

A dime chinks into a soda machine, and

I see her coming, she’s coming down

the sidewalk, she’s coming around the

mountain, here she comes, with electric

six string six shooter, or is it a bow and sling?

Tall in the saddle of a fender mustang, too

spent to want anything anymore.

Finally wanting nothing, now, absolutely still,

paralyzed with wonder or starvation,

she attains the will.