Saturday, May 28, 2005

Ch ch ch ch Changes

Petrarchan Phases
.
small change is drastic, a catastrophic shift in
the balance of the way things had always once
been, diminished undulations of a passing life
gone in incremental devastations, never again
to hear music in just the same way, or to bite
into an apple with the intrinsic candor of a
polished red abandon, a bell gone forth to find
its clarion source in brassy closure, once
relished vigorously, an arrival that is never
more, never less, than a radical return, the
sound of clanging in cloth pockets and
a specified end, a singular cold
.
on cold giving way to freeze in the lea, an
expansive icing of care, so that what had once
been is remembered as warmer in a world of
what has become,
the thing giving birth to the world that is.
perhaps it is me that has changed or perhaps
the universe has stopped whirling, altered its
course, quit on fiat and on waiting for the
conflagration culminating in the end of
tiresome samsaric revolutions that drain joy
from living.

Friday, May 27, 2005

I'd Pay The Devil To Replace Her

An Old Lament Made of Mud and Sky
.
Oblique corona of absence, black, wailing wind, dust storm of lament, bleak light, the feet that carried her away, out of a crumbling rotunda of stones, are pressed in mud, sun-baked stones
.
undone by love's eroding promises, withdrawn are the passionate invitations of a full woman whose roundnesses my fingers crave, my lips measured the distances between her supple upturned ends,
.
her scent is gone, her salt no longer sharpens my slackened tongue, the tongue that read to her, recited verses, sung her name, same tongue now stained purple with wine of grapes, cracked lips on which only interminable mumbling splutters,
.
reason's gone, blank, dumb and lightless,
a fist shakes, relentlessly, at the sky.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Honesty Is Such A Lonely Word

Decomposition
.
It has been a year of surgeries. I
nurse self inflicted wounds. I have to claw
around for a word. I've cut the throat of
every word I've ever known. There has been
a rockslide in my body, an avalanche
of words has given way. It crouches against
a hillside like a cat backed onto its
haunches. Granite, snow-like, flutters in mid-
air. I mark each flake, each tiny dust-grave
with a cross of incremental self-betrayals--
inaccessible word. Former friends, past loves,
take flight, shove off without me. I retain
.
nothing of their unctuous fire. I lie in
a sullen plot of falsity. Words shuck me
like a pea. They walk past me at a slow
and tidy pace. I may never be heard by
passersby whose conversations recall what
once had been, what had been said by whom.