filigree effacement

Welcome to the Museum of Being 

Veins closed, protected from light 

Proof remains

Embedded 

Where pyres burn for no witness 

Depths congealed

By floods standing in a heap 

Waters named for rivers 

Melted 

Buttered

Mourning for strange speech

Left here

Under the broken but balanced bench posts 

The tentativeness of a scheduled ambivalence 

Pomp of prescience 

An absent arrival 

Welcomed home to all those fragile vessels

Holding their case for justice 

A wobbly waltz, learned

And a try to teach, profess

Salty lids for containment

When the mirror of madness breaks 

Maybe the worms will have us 

Only the rings of our bones will know 

Our carried tales grown tall

mechanics, maybe

We eat the sun now, fate and fury

Having hung Earth

Over an abyss of teeth

The realm of morality 

Our conceptual husks

These bodies

Contemplative and manifolded 

On wooden legs of suffering 

Call to the birds of Heaven

Named “WHY”

A self consumption 

Because we long for more moons

The elegance of the unknown 

It shines and dances

A wax or a wane too soon

attention’s carriage

Palms full, heavy at the stones

I see practicing their lies 

Although they no longer hold water remain 

The Gate Keepers

But too pass at the offing 

The final chasm of light

An atlas of the sky’s tide

At our sea’s cessation 

Frosted over

We simply collapse, shattered 

Under the weight of our own arms

A marriage of words

That make the wise head of the mountain 

Where time lives forever - 

Wisdom's Ruins

And still we sigh

No one to know how well we’ll die

virtue/deceit

Spoken from lungs deep

And acquainted with hidden things 

Well springs from man 

His remorseful starving body 

Crying out for a name 

He’s initiated into these mysteries, where 

You can plant churches 

But not turn soil

Cedar cliffs erected we breath under 

Swallowing ships of passions, prayers 

These signs performed, tricks in begging 

Election to surrender to the immeasurable waters

We’ve all taken our flame from the fire

Where the prophets long sent in stream

Our sons not yet rose with all their bright ambition 

But buried in the grounds of the ten thousand named

long lived

Through what phantoms do we 

Invest our snow 

In dialogue with dismembered darkness

A theater for the poets to endure

Under the threat of mirage

We’re salting the Earth

From dusty sawhorse compartments 

Tortured by what is all attractive

That which stands and falls and lingers

On black, sad lips 

By gone articulations 

Stray while reigning tall to tragedy 

Blame laid regards power 

Power to punish

And the punished wander 

Their resentiment merits 

Serpentine suspicion 

Low under to curiosity

Having met the monsters of your cave

Familiar with the consequence of that maze

Shelter, stained 

ripe

Kept company by the desert

I wake in the morning at least

Under the promise of a different war

On wheel and wasps wing, we bloom 

Raging against decay 

Inventions of old stories

Fetters, chains 

Golden gods misremembered 

Held with both hands

We hang

For A While Now

Traveling on sun’s beam

Sinking on ocean’s inhale

Sighing out love

The most

Lost on the out breath

Denial to pause; to serve 

Having tied the loose ends 

And contained the spills

And mopped the sloppy footprints 

And what’s left

I am

Unused that is 

And maybe those borders

That which hangs around the edges

Pending disposal 

Actually keeps us around

Across and through

As in relevant 

This, not that

Peanut butter and jelly words 

Black, no sugar 

Life, not death

When character is wiped away 

Fallen in simplification 

More struggle comes with discernment

The removal of chaff

If I can’t say 

With all the too much pauses 

With the whelm

With the heavy, leaking trail that follows our stories loose 

Their form ceases, their way, their function 

The play ceases, drama arrests

Actors demise imminent 

We cannot eliminate uncertainty without certain death to being

A Crooked Cure

It is said some threads must grow

Some waters must be subdued

And congruently recanted

Those same waters of the divine

Having inspired gods and monsters alike - unlimited and immeasurable 

So the waters

Also having 

Erupted from the firmament 

On account of the frenzy, noisy flights 

Require this degraded machine 

An organization to quell spiritual inspiration 

For when the floods rise 

Their stance arrives elected

Came committed

They stand in staunch declaration of their presence 

Thieves of the sacred stage

Tragic denial to patterned shelters

To courage of sensuality 

Are we not too dammed 

Peach Seed Womb

We are not machines 

We are not blankets

We are not these sweaters meant to crinkle with age 

We are not exactly their matrix of support 

Our limbs do have a little rigidness to them 

A robustness not unlike that of waters deep 

Steeped too

So maybe we are grounds

To justice, to punish

A firmness in footing 

For what dregs do we stand our truth on 

But exiled all the same

Sacred Scale

Consumed by nostalgia

A kind of deserted home sickness

Where certain threads 

Invent the lowest of sands 

Beggars pause

Covered in the goo of seed’s rest

The ancient assault kneaded animal forms 

A perpetual repayment 

Knows the secret of it’s fruits

And hides them well

We define hell

Only to seek salvation 

Only to hide from fear

The spectacle 

And the suspicious, tallest gods

Of thunder and lightning 

Demonizes imagination  

The permissions of evil 

An undoubting sickness 

We exchange the superstition of guilt 

For discipline of self 

For spirit’s unstrengthened by violent victories 

For what was bound to grow out of our bellies 

Lights removed

Can man remain a bridge unto himself?

That which worlds are made of 

Broomstick Courage

I took out the tiny white stars 

And palmed their potential 

We all have them

Reminders, archives 

The preamble of our childrens’ flower tassels

How incandescent 

Our nature, our imitations

They demand, “Creator, Creator!”

Where the Buffalo Roam

Herds of only babies

Lost for their wandering bellies

The love covenant rode away on some 

Marauding gail 

Bones of their bones

Flesh of flesh

A decomposing scroll 

With faith over fate

They lament 

Worried their guideposts will mislead

Salt and light

Plow the plains 

To search for pearls in sunken places 

A formless veil fell

Seeming to see

Epilogues of the world, the wall 

Provisions Promised

What are we leaving for Heaven

A consciousness which broke its wings

In search of permission to fly 

In what interests are those distant spheres concerned

Dizzying pursuits of suns’ rays 

Where the sweat pulls the dust

Our assemblage of gold, of lead we earned

Of bare feet full of doubting leaves 

Where everything is all at once 

Warp and weft propped, allegiance to counted stars

Elect, pursue

The demanded devoirs 

Eyes of the spirit only hold the provincial gaze

In reconciliation 

In justification

In promise of reason’s ruse 

it’s romantic

Who thought to

(Or assumed of it’s possibility)

Unhinge, unanchor, remove the hook that has been sunk deep into

The lyrical narrative the colors your tears

The being that hangs and sticks

Words to its stained brick walls

White washed with reason

Often

The museum of sounds

Spells of tongues pressed to the roofs of mouths

Muses lie by those big red leather chairs where myths

Passed to mirrors

Our sole depth of reflection we cannot live without

Where holes tattered, spun wild heaps of knots

For naught

Needles for repair sneak in

Tricking the scene they too mend

In defense of a tightly bound configuration of similarities          

Expressed by symmetrical differences

Behind glassy cases where dust webs gather

Their songs witness and wing to inheritance

That crystalline box held ephemeral movement in suspension

A beat which pounds at the sky

A million steps wide

Ticks out the tide recurring

Confirms why, will

Reminders for ever, never?

The existence of an altered sill

Insistent homes made by the display of decay

Where mockingbirds continue their tradition of wail and woe

Nests of lightened leaves

What was heavy removed by night’s sun thieves

Gates of Asymmetry

Providence hangs

On crosses at every street corner

Repented on undercurrent, on being

Its embroidered lettered coats

Cast sails to seas

Innocent as pearls are ancient

To what do we owe those who have nothing

But us

A grand clouded mount

A hope in lust

I would stand upon that grave

Proclaiming perfection

When our orders are perverted

Set to grail

Lost in some vast valley

Marching with no guide

To summit its peaks

No bright star to dive its depths

Their violence requires

What is more than human:

Our lions’ sunny halos

Light tempered

We eat our nation

Sucklings double take

At their climbed willow ladders

All I have is you

But all you have is freedom

For only in those high pitches

Are burrowing tombs

honeycomb

The ethics of bees

Which remain crying

In desperation

Their civility lacks reflection

How worthwhile is their punctuality in

A Nature great

For its forgotten adherence to chaos

Having lost not one of those to love

Their suspension, an antiquity

Lacking a pride that yearns for the uncommon

Buried beneath a shrugged weight of winds

Eyes rest for a long while

But hiding commits you to the custody of angels

For bees cannot blush with the spirit’s light

the last one

What are we permitted to save

The new earth is dead having already committed

Its entire being

To a many tongued reflection

Quit searching behind

The past perfect judgements of good and evil

Beyond, rather

The bright isles of wind, a mount

Stands a little higher than the world

From it, a declaration of earnest

Howls, “Shall”

To grieve

The age of innocence has decayed

The lanterns needn’t light themselves

In the persecuted church

With garlands woven with the journey

Trimmed with dirt

As if this were not more than enough

Justice served

High born and invisibly armed

An undecorated revenge

But they say carrying secret weapons is forbidden

Exchange is to bargain for oblivion

It’s stock in the waters where the shades find drink

The issue in once in every hundred is forever

Is love true; truth, love?

Is nothing holy

If not these borderlands

Shadows in a dark room

Too heavy to hold themselves up

Agni

The otherwise honest potential of the stars

Cheapen the implicit death in their eternal burning

Lies

To risk a life but save a mind gone to fire

But you crumbled like the same dust in my hands

I licked you, wetted

Hoping to turn your windiness back to clay

A revival of sorts

Left for arrival of practicality

A romance of function

Summons to build palaces for the monsters I’ve met

Dug them out, hungry

The emptiness remains a deep cup

Full of black

Tar

I let it swallow and fill me up

Unrecognizable in my new coat, laughing

I auctioned those stars

Reins over wreckage

They bargained more than my fair share of fat

An impractical lurid tide

A try to sell the sky

Asunder

As the waters whipped

Edifying change

Edible (in its solar brightness)

Incantations spoke of

Those giants buried in the mountains

We asked to move

Gaped

With their one jaw to earth

The other hung to Heaven

Those bent to crucifixion

Having a particular courage

To hold committed, the crimes of the Holy

A deep melodic compass which says

Sorrow is a home

Here is where we lay our salty wounds

Sacred as the sea, as tears

Either

Where the heiros finds hymns

We have enough but maybe only for sin

Posited loss in desire

What’s ripe for picking

Cast to fire

By daybreak, I swore we’d by home

In what forgetful eyes did you suppose

A sacrifice of the right to chose:

Elected space to talk to God

Touch the earth

Tiny feet for inspiration

And teacup stares, whimsy wonders of your hair

Now you can go back to being

All imagination