Who is there?
Crawling through the mud
Raising my head
To look at the stars
I see only your face
Patterns depict your eyes
Engraved by time.
Tears roll away
The cleansing of me
From your soul
Serpentine amity to protect you
While trampled, forsaken
And apparently hated, bide my time
Until I feel it might be right
Again, to bask in the sun,
And inhabit our forgiveness.
With whom have I made this pact
You see, and where might they be
At all, all at once not here
How queer! How curious it is
That I see almost the back of my own head
As I take off
the crown of nails
That bled the rocks red
Of the roadside wall
Whereron I laid down such memory; ferocity
Such fervent conviction
That the other might always be.
While I waited for you to do your hair
And to come back once more
To sooth my impatience
The universe spilling outward from you.
Who planted this flittering notion
The ribbon of gratitude for nothing,
Of things taken for granted
Which might cajole a drunkard inwards
Imbibed with toxic curiosity
And certain of the role written, behold!
The road toward the gallows pole
Would be one in the same thing.
What is this form, which cannot be
chased in either time or space
But emerges only in the insanity
Of hardly grasped constructs
Reminding me of a tilled furrow
Or a circumnavigation of the globe.
Child-like scolded fight-practice
Lessens the wrongs for a man
Who rehearses in earnest
So the burning maps charr away all sense
Forsaking everything for this pitch black
Purgatorial vessel,
Can the torturer continue?
And who is he/she?
Long forgotten, put
into the cold, put out
Outside, chastised
Conditioned perverted complexity,
Long since prevented
From the beginning at the outset
The origins of inverted and mirrored universes
A hazard, a risk, a man supposedly
Inhuman, but at least original.
For I do know the soul!
Its scope, the vast capabilities
In horizons blue
Of how to move with you
If you would only see
If you could only
Know that I too see the lie
And the recognition of its face
The veil of lace
the life unlived, the skilled
Hampered, unrecognized, exalted
In the mouths of an unworthy few,
Who have never even, begun!
Always walking away
Heads bowed in shame
Of ever associating with
The mental business of a displaced heart.
Pitiful admiration of a decaying corpse
That dances it’s last death
Before the real one
Black, eternal a shroud
A hood of solitude, bound to the crowd
A thether for the kook
To that spell you cast
In your rejection, your recognition
Of that misplaced hurt
I mislaid onto you and
Which you now cherish
Which I am guilty of keeping
inside my anorak,
Black witch.
You know and see that truth, I know
And see that lie too.
The contradiction that cannot be
For you wrought it to be
Inventing the diatribe
That fracked and hacked to the distant reaches of
What is perceived as time.
I know this because
You will not see, cannot
The vial of antidote
That I have cooked for thee
How clear is this bead
For thy tongue.
What is this readiness to ignore?
This swiftness, to extradite
The signals that I have come to observe only
The dreams of night,
an involuntarily blooming
And no longer generate as
Of those which once arose in me,
The stupid boy I was.
I know what is forbidden
Lest I can know the edge of reason
And have seen it well, that pitiful pit
The scorched earth and see it still,
But I know the seat of intention well.
How do you know, beautiful one
What I am, will you never forgive and let it be
Even as it moves alone in acceptance blind?
Were you not also lost in pointlessness
A slave to the primitive fear
That you might discover the sense
Of flight, as a cardinal archetype
Flew across your nest, and made you cower
Don’t you still?
I can only admit this.
There remains some unwanted ghost
A dance between the you and the I
Are they not the same now?
For me a chance we might speak again
With our intentions so,
Wrested together in the bright morning.
In the repeating eternity of lightning flashes
Coming to me in reverie;
Pulsating life beneath the lie,
I am truly dead once more,
But it is neither you, nor I.
There is no place or space for rest
When Morse pauses call
For observed calling of
This corpse that wishes for salvation
From the personal hell, broadening in time
Lessening in hope
Racing toward the grave.
A sea of only ones and Zeroes
Everything in the singular, or nothing
Each time, the assisted drowning
Of the heart’s essential intent.
I cannot justify any of it!
Has it not always been so?
The truth is now, the truth is near, here remaining
In the long distant and all too short memory of your smile
Comb in hand, hair oil glistening on your fingertips.
If life were to be pleasure, had I known better
Surely, the fault were not mine then
As I did not
Understand, the ways of my soul.
I am bound to that
which passes through the gates of understanding
The cost is the loss; the union of my own self
Helped back together by thee, finally
to be split once more.
How did it happen in the sun
Obscured by clouds that erase
All past sunrises
And those to come
The obliteration of all my words
Escaped to paradise without the utterer
Too heavy the millstone collar I wore
That dreamt of a solid gold necklace
How could I have been so wrong,
so misguided,
I wonder, dost thou?
Did I seek the trap or set it myself
That I now would bleed so long and
Enrich the ground of only my capturer
Were I to have those wings still,
The feathers of dead birds
A pair to lie upon my window cill,
Which is what remains to be eaten
By the gulls.
My readiness though
Is the waste of that lesson
My preparedness, the twisting
snake that writhes its self destruction
Stabbed by the red-hot spear
Of my ignorance and awakening
And which are equally repulsive
Is it not so?
Who is there?
