From an idle bird to a lonely tree in winter


What has gone and left you?  Love?
What is love to you?
Is it the lips you've kissed, the presently forgotten arms?
Was it the lovely lies, knocked and borrowed?

Is beauty your love?  Did you make the most of your little day?
Had you the knowledge of what to do with your brittle, summer plough-land?
Did biology speak, entreat or strike?
To which tumbled shed did the mouse vanish with your vows?  You knew not they were gone?

Indeed, that you were longer-lived, what sang might see a leave in your little see
Might sing why beauty is the must, sleeping in the will
The slow gnawing of a useless wagon, all alike
Seeking the life protested none, but itself set foot upon

Love is not a lament to be sung in your little house on your little street
It is the lamp left lit while you sought it in the twilight
Love is a sullen voice that must be brought out of the underworld
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

I rain for the sky
Like a sea going to die
Windy laughing kisses
Wave fluttering goodbyes

I rejoice beautiful bird stories
From the firm hills
Flesh time pulsing still
As deep magic spills

Soon a hidden lost loneliness sprays
Jealous tumults of heat and mist
A crackling cosmic clearing as blue bows to grave
It is the earth and not the sky that weeps for clay.

You Are Not Mistaken

You are not mistaken,
You wanted deception and now you are deceived,
Betrayed by fairy tales
Or could it be, you betrayed them?
You built your castle in the dark, in the shade
Where the sun could not dry the roof after the rain,
Crumpling, rotting and collapsing
On your insufferable dreams.
You are not mistaken,
Sanctity has fled, despite your demure sighs.
The livestock could not resist the violets in your garden
Planted so near your pride and joy,
Their droppings, sanctity for the flies
That now devote themselves to your emotions
And buzz your lullabies.
You are not mistaken,
My devotion was left to rust,
In the shed where all my talents were solemnly strewn
So that they would never awaken
Your Sleeping Beauty.

Red Fell From Blue

A firmament saturated.
Monochromatic purity unable to
Permeate a palette more
Of heavenly hue,
Sacrificed
Blood love ripe as cherry sin
Thickened with a revolutionary rue.
Courage
Red fell from blue.

My muse is a cat
Haunching just out of reach, a
Sudden spring claws me.

The Ladybug

A true lady took my arm
And listened to my fawning
Sweet nothings fed to her
As a foreign seduction.
She listened
Without insult to my swooning
The wings of her independence
Put away beneath her charm
And we each forgot our day
Just for a little moment
Before she flew away
As if something were on fire.

Testosterone guards the water lily,
Ready to confront even the poet
Whose own weapons were waved
To win the blossom.
The Neanderthal can keep the lily
And its roots into the abyss.
The gliding green algae is for me.
A suspended spray shining its own style
Neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat,
Uncountable, blanketing and iridescent.
A motherly hue, enshrouding that from which the lily grew,
But who is that poking his head out of the silt and slim?
A scaly, hermited Hector, haughtily challenging any Wordsworthian Achilles
With designs of panky prose of his pale pitchy hell.
I will have my remembrance,
So I line him to my chariot
And drag him around the reedy
Walls of Troy
Until the water lily weeps for his release.

Who's Femur Is That?

Who's femur is that
     Protruding from the cemetery sand
The only marker left
     The hoar of some unknown man
I ponder...
     Was it ever in his plan
To be expired in such a way
     Disjointed from rib and hand

Could all his mourners sit in the kirk
     Were many forced to stand
Did the preacher praise his era
     Or skip to the psalm again
Had the procession need of the caisson
     Was there a military band
As for one shipped home with honors
     From some foreign land

What fate befell his widow
     How long their generational span
And did his mates toast his passing
     With a round of black and tan
The moniker on the nearby stones
     Might indicate his clan
Wait, round comes a hound who scoops it up
     He's playing fetch with Pan

The Fever

It was the result of muddle,
A fiend's muddle,
The rage and despair of Nietzsche
Incipient in a Laodicean luau.
Me metamorphosed measuredly
Into a brute lying in tribulation,
Ears pricked to bravado boasts, brutal.
I shudder...
Woe beckons.
I shudder...
The Upper Hand wantonly whirlwinds words.
My hand is on my mouth.
I shudder with sorrow...
Then, the word is seen.
The Word is seen!
Nodes of nouns,
Atoms of adjectives,
An all-night nightmare
Wrestling with a whirlwind's
Unanswerable voice visible, seen, seen!
Zero-hour, the boiling point.
Nouns bead across my harangued forehead.
Adjectives calmly, warmly, pour from my pores
Acquiescing the terrifying rhetorical trial in my mind,
They coolly travel an alternate route to my tongue
And kilned clay speaks,
Not of redemption,
But of reprieve.

Silvery ghosts float
Suspended in stygian,
A fish tank at night.

Dulcinea

She moved in and gave me green
Together we gave it blue
It grew.
No roses bloomed, though fed our red
Like an omen it turned brown
She left town.
Still it sits upon the white
An errant's hope, I give it sapphire
My air and fire.

Like a butterfly
She changes with age, each stage
Is more beautiful.

Singularity

While strolling through spacetime on a tangent
A funny thing happened...a singularity snared me.
She had smooth causal curves
Curves within curves
Curves beyond curves
Infinite curvature.
Her vertical null cones
Expressed the proportional tensor force my body felt.
My electrons crowded on top of each other
Peering for a ponderable surface.
Hovering just above her horizon, before the event,
Sustained by degeneracy pressure and highly red shifted,
I slipped inside...time stopped.
My energy exhausted, I collapsed inward
A weak energy condition she used to
Trap me to her surface.
She pressed against me
Pressure within pressure
Pressure beyond pressure
Infinite pressure.
The I of i was ended.
The eye of i was bared.
Origination supplanted origin
With fresh radiated joys unable to escape,
Now residing in a nirvana
Shared only between myself and my singularity.
Observers note only that I paused my stroll
To regard a cosmic flower,
Indefinitely.

I just want to hear
A voice loving and sincere.
I am deaf, I fear.

Strength

Little girl I am not here to
Play your frivolous games or
Indulge your fanciful flings.
I do not build facades
Like your boyish fellows
In a factitious feint
To contain your wild wonder,
Your wind, your currents, your waves.
Their faux walls,
Mere piles of brick and stone,
You destroy piece-by-piece,
In chunks or all at once
At your leisure
To be lost,
Dragged into your
Murky, briney depths.

I am an island.
A barrier of sand in the midst of your
Restless expanse.
The pieces of me you carry away today
Gleam smooth and warm on my shore
Returned on tomorrow's morn,
Neither tattered, tattooed, torn nor worn.
Your crashing surf,
Slides off me as receding waves,
Each cycle leaving me
Minutely elevated, enriched.
Your storms, your hurricanes, your typhoons,
Brandish, fling your
Flotsam and jetsam,
Giving forth the wreckage
You thought sunken.
They cannot disquiet my infrangible foundation,
Merely sticking in me
Your marks, your tokens, your grails,
Drying and musking in the sun
Until their dark putrid damp
Becomes a bleached white bouquet
To be carried off by the birds,
Used as asylum for virgin life or
Patiently slip beneath
My level, even calm.
Through time and your
Trivially testing tectonic twitches,
You will become an inland sea
Surrounded,
Harbored by me.