When all seems like music, it is, falling
in & through, a dance riddled with colors,
movement by melody & wind, within blown out,
laughter a hand flung into shadows, become
open water, more, stronger blood, more. More.
***
Something not yet word, nor yet shine,
yet beyond shadow, a dance & a blaze,
no longer blue fancy, remorse tugging
for release. I don't know. A game,
this cosmos? Time + play? Rhythm & ferment,
war & what strokes achingly along its edge,
something from somewhere, reclamation
of a dream, not yet word, nor yet shine,
no longer blue fancy. Once. Twice. Breathe.
Relax. Once. Twice. Breathe. Relax. Once.
Twice. Breathe. Relax. Now conjure at will.
Lights & hue, make of them. Nothing too late,
nothing too soon. A dream no longer dream,
what leads through crowds & silence alike.
Everything passes, no secrets budding, no pending
bliss. No path but diminishing echoes.
When all seems like music, it is, opening
out & out & out, dance riddled by color, movement
by shimmer & glare, what burbles madly in the woods,
galaxy, sea & dream. An ever craze for more.
***
Once. Twice. Breathe. Relax.
All is forgiven.
Sing happiness to a room full of dead
chairs, sing & sigh to a ceiling pulling
outward for more, out & out, out, for
more, all is forgiven. Hum. Continue.
Once. Twice. Breathe. Relax.
Let history's testaments fall to sand.
Let the trail of old blood diminish away.
Let deepest love cup not contain & thus
learn by release, flutter, renewal, blessing.
Alone, kiss the carpet. Shivering, kiss the sky.
Hopeful, kiss strangeness. Despairing, kiss your dreams.
Once. Twice. Breathe. Relax.
All is forgiven, even what pocks & remains.
When all seems like music, hold out
hands to catch some shine. Give over
to dance riddled in colors, to whatever
persists. To knowing, believing, what clasps
one to another. Breathe. Relax.
***
ii. Turning On
What lasts? Nocturnes, smoke, nothing.
A sheaf, awhile. Trees, ideas of trees,
fire. Stellar revolutions, distances resembling
slowness. Nothing, something. Nocturnes,
smoke. The hope of perhaps. Brighter hours
yet & to come.
What persists? Rhythm & ferment. Skies
softening, wet release, stars, silence.
Human music chasing the eternal. Memories
hung on sweet pikes, skewered through
heart's every content. Falling through water,
another life, a drifting gesture.
What now? We continue loving in the
distance. The obscure, the underneath.
Something pending, everything, again. Rhythm
& ferment, soon blaze, acceleration.
Pending rivulets shudder, provoke new songs.
***
iii. Firelife
Coins fall down pools of magick,
twist, dissolve,
hearts fall, meet & fall,
something remains, keep singing.
Several words, now deeper, keep singing.
Coins fall down, watch, the hope
of perhaps, love reveals, love explains,
something, everything, what flows among
the wires & chains, what presses laughter
one to another. How high yet to go?
Forever. Coins fall down, we love nearer,
she laughs, I follow, I sing, she
embodies, we love nearer, meet & fall,
hand folds into hand, breathe, relax.
Kiss strangeness, follow it through the sky,
the hope of perhaps twists, dissolves, keep
singing. I keep seeking her til she curls
along me, today, tonight. Forever plainly
known in the rising laughter of hazel eyes.
Hearts fall, meet & fall. Embody, sing. Near.
***
iv. Moonstones
But something else too, something furious
with its own existence, how to live,
how to live. How to live & why.
She shifts among depths, a glance
between walls, up toward leaves, she
hears music, quiet, pressing. How to live.
She knows. She tells me & my pen
hurries, becomes two, bounces, broils,
yes, I see. Tonight, love, I see. No how,
no why. I have no pen. There is no art.
Teach me. Patience, she says. We know
your hunger bears my name. We know.
She kisses my cheek, says feel my vow.
Tonight, love, I see. No pen. No art.
Clouds swish across fullest moon &
I watch, wondering toward your next lesson.
***
v. Veil
Walk in hunger, pray in hunger, love
in wild bursts, airless gulps. Feel what
tremors about your skin, what watches,
what follows. Sometimes spoken in the
pink of a wanting cheek, laugh becomes
moan, thicking clouds, unthreading
nests. Look about, the beggar & the king
equally slave to need's claw & sunset's
burn. Look about, let nothing be which
can deeper teach you that you know
nothing, & still you stride. Walk in hunger,
love in hunger, fuck in hunger. Fuck
inevitably, die in surprise. Submit to
wisdom in molecule & feather, let the
strange dogs within scream & cry, whimper
& weak. Let the world's hustles disappear
wholly into the sugar of thine heart.
Walk in hunger, thrash. Believe.
Say I love you: it matters. The world sips
at your song. Say I love you: she listens.
Within her a bell breaks & moans. Say
I love you to the night's banshees, to what
strokes with holy intent. Say I love you:
she reaps. The morning glows & she follows.
Walk in hunger, hurry. Begin everywhere, nowhere.
Sing to her the heavy songs, white
explosions, battering lullabies, loathesome
bright things. Sing to her of secret want
dirty & delicious. The gravity & whim of
biting wordless things. Teeth across her back,
caterwaul for dreaming's promised new
world. Raise her, shake her hard from
within, the room cutting blood & coarse
echoes for more. Nothing to explain love's
sweet whore grace. Submit, hunger never
ceases, immolate slowly with her. Squeeze, empty.
Cry out to the sky. Let its silence tend you.
***
vi. Lovers
You crawl toward daylight, bearing an
instrument hardly yet played, a heart
barely sung. What pulls you back flares
& gnashes. You gnash back harder, become
a soft fist in heat, a butterfly spark
in a doorless room.
A beauty, first & last flower of
the world. A true note, plain & golden,
more than crawling toward sunshine,
flickering past wicked days, pulsating
creature, teeth in my flesh, fury in
my nights. A cry, full, empty, dawn's
new life between us. Faith: beasts ranging
across a landscape, tribal noise
passing as survival, unto music.
No answers to blood's tumult, nor
the thrashing question of kings
& preachers: How long?
A thousand years lain among stellar
rubble & strewn grace. Gourds of
language. Useless among the dead &
the yet. Stripes of fire conjure in
forests of sentience. Waiting.
Waiting. Samely crowds of jerk & color. Scriptures
of excrement lead armies fang-wild
& scholars airless & sure. Nothing.
Then morning a cry, full & empty,
a vow, tears, dawn's magick grappled
& cast. Rain. Forgiveness. Blessing.
Something. What crosses what. Begun,
deepens. Crawling, now walking,
now you arrive, now we continue.
***
vii. Reverence
The music of silence. A tremble, a flicker.
Dream raises liberation, caterwaul, a leap.
Nights tremble with vow, rhythm, blowing things.
Reverence: where one rests around dawn.
***
viii. Drift
Hush. Reckon a rising world around that
charred figure chanting goldensong.
Hand conjures hand, make broad stains
unto a landscape, new rivulets through
the cosmos, greater songs ferment. Drifting,
dashing gestures. Hush. Eventual sunshine.
Bells, birds, yet still withal the heartbeat
of waiting. Branches shimmer with plainness,
prayers old & new blow by, days reach
taller with mystery. Hush. What opens
out, blows up brightly, cries, squawks:
truth not extant in sugar or machine.
Hush. World fattens with miracle & woe,
strangers cross in dreams, trade words
like fidelity, possession. Notice faith
walking misty night streets humming
songs of stroking stars, cascading kisses.
Hush. Passions again accelerate, twinings
like leaves & fruit. Among goldensong
your name persists. Hopeful, heated,
you know & receive.
***
ix. Guerrilla
Believe everything, beyond the capacity of
lung & will. Heed fire in the air, brilliance
in your veins, cosmos in every hand. Believe.
Despair. Between: breathe harder. Bellow
in an empty street toward a diamond hope unknown.
Believe. It hurts. Now, in places lined with
placards & bells. It hurts. You exist:
choiceless, eager. Pulled forward, outward,
you resist. Death ever sings a sugar song
along your skin. Believe & moan. Again.
Resist, submit: Anarchy murmurs in the heart.
I know you know. Alive, thus restless.
Music calls you alive you listen. Drums join
head to heart to thigh to beat. I know
you know. Dance harder within, it hurts, it frees.
Believe, vast trees, full moon, the yes & beyond
of night's music. Laugh, call it faith.
A charred figure chanting goldensong. Hand
conjures hand, makes broad stains unto a
landscape, new rivulets through the cosmos.
Greater songs ferment. Believe with
music, something like a lingual dance,
fire in the air, brilliance in your veins,
cosmos in every hand. Beyond smile &
yes, need's need. An open field, ascending
bonfire, freedom a thousand bodies & still
opening outward. A full moon, where the
many prayers pass through & back, I know
you know. Anarchy murmurs in the heart.
Resist, submit. One true note, deeper,
higher. Music resembling home at certain
rising hours. Resembling love, clarity.
Holy emptiness, laughing. One true note,
& a persistent fancy of her dancing: cyclone, fury.
Believe everything: smile, sigh. A myth
beyond this moment, its maybe, its
volition. Accelerating, again, with greener
truth of trees & constellations. These words
suddenly erupt, again, in music, & somewhere I explode.
***
x. Agape
Dream moves us persistent within the stiff ground,
now resembling play, now wreckage, now
glistening night. Music shimmers greater
between us, we sum to other than one or
two. Now past sleep, emptied of bed, what
remains a leaving shaped by hazel eyes,
a thrilling twist of eros & agape, a rhythm
chanting hope's choiceless spell.
Eros: delight's rootless bells conjure your
voice, the palm-shaped softness of your
hands among mine, our kiss imploding
us into something greater than one or two,
your sigh blood-badging my deepest recoils
into solitude's fears.
Dream moves persistent, through fake
daylight calm, through night's years
of skyless joy.
Agape: loving souls ringing in the barrel of
a half dead world, what kindness means
when everyone at last is drowning. Your absence
sometimes twinkles, a message by wish &
flash, my lost nights rise up with a cry,
spit your name out, choiceless, tender.
Dream betimes bears a rank beast, call it
despair, nosing about my heart. Day's silence
knows no comfort, calls night a dead vine twisting nearer.
Eros: I love you. This leap, moan, this bleed
unceasing. Then somewhere you laugh.
Something jingles within roaring populace
of wounds. A grace persists. Though tethered
it sings. Loyal misfit days pass comfort between
us, by stars, by scraps.
Dream rouses me with a kiss, a blessing:
hope abounds. By wave, by clot, by flicker.
Bear this like a charm.
Agape: faces dirtless with irony say
keep the words back, healing is for
children & fools. The king preaches
agape culled from scripture & hubris.
Resistance chants up a bright endless
parade.
Dream's wealth burrows a poor life, collects
its stolen fruit: my pen conjures hands
tending those who whimper alone.
A growl deep among trees, hunger or
recent feeding, the pond nearby a crazy
rhythm of watching bubbles, the limbs
above feathered with the perpetual
offices of nurture. The world's pulse plain &
golden save among men where a coin
or a god or a hoary myth interfere.
Explain. Delude.
Dreaming still the kind mystery walking naked free
among us, here it pools & shines, there it
recedes to a whipping thirst. Now it throbs
irregularly, a beat, two in chime, more,
like our palm-shaped grasp, like a song of faith.
***
xi. Home
Again throbbing absence, a flu of want.
A faith weighted with faint joys & bending plaints.
Wishes nurture, & contrain. Old paths obscure.
My pen grabs me & hurries through clouds
of thicking human idiocies.
I love you: I am breaking.
***
xii. Insurrection
My world empties. Yours fills. Smell the poison.
My life corrodes. Yours glares. Lies upon lies.
My hands flail. Yours busy with baubles. Crumble, resist.
My body aches & presses. Yours silent, a doll. Our want still scirocco.
My heart insurrects. Yours shrieks in the dark. Smother, breathe.
A new world still murmurs. You're still dreaming my face. Love's deepest treasure.
***
xiii. Nada
Chase her among the beats, stellar
music tightens sad, releases joy,
melodies of knowing & nada through
the mist moving all things. She nears
again & the why breaks into branches &
windy petals, among the beats what's
obscure flickers open, love plain &
golden. From a life's anguish shudders
out a dream, now glittering, flare, explosion.
She nears again, among the beats, &
I cry faith! fidelity! Receive me your every
terror I will quiet you. Burn our ruins to
cascade night's pathless woods. Home
a chase mong stranger beats now, awhile.
Faith, fidelity. What must love become to
endure? Dream me, kiss me, make it hard,
make it hurt. Beat my will into a weapon for
your worship. I will be the lasting instrument
strumming you, stroking you, blowing
out the rhythms & melodies your heart
bears but hardly still calls its own.
***
xiv. High
Whatever restrains, let go:
You are not high enough.
Whatever devolves stellar music
to dumb habit, let go:
You are not high enough.
Where grey's plummet presses out
thine vista's green twining, let go:
You are not high enough.
Free howling rapture become
sensation's clumsy greed, let go:
You are not high enough.
Whatever, whoever, wherever crushes
& bruises with a distracted glance,
let go: You are not high enough.
When letting go itself abandons what salves
the torn & tender within, hold on.
Reckon daylight's approach & summit's nearing.
***
xv. Lateral
Snowstorm in the mountains. A carriage
awaits passage. Someone speaks of home.
The wish one suffers and sings for. One & many,
slow & hurry. Someone speaks of home, rising evermore.
I think of one girl, then another, past, present.
Spell, shaping. I think of trees along a snowy
road. This yearning's diminishing music. Hope direct
& lateral across the heart.
Someone speaks of home. Other days will bounce,
scatter shivers through flesh thin with happy
memory. She resists departure. I allow, she
denies. I look elsewhere, she follows, comments.
Derides what is other, less. I'm dreaming her
again. Then I dream other things. Nocturnes
rush & recede about her. Still. Golden hours
gone. A thousand miles from anywhere.
Snow a deep wet bell for hope pliant to
burrow. Hope: your face, your eyes, the blooming
scent of your abyss. I love you. Everything
shifts. Little lets go. Noise of nature's morning prayers.
Springtime snowstorm. Child wailing for home.
Words flatten with longing, something,
someone. Anywhere. You. Forlorn, I tap a wing,
await a companion. Think of music's restless crave.
***
xvi. Kneel
Golden hours gone, nocturnes rent with
cold burn, a thousand miles from anywhere.
Tonight music shudders briefly, & again,
lashes nada's spectacle, dead rhythms
kicked for whatever convulse remains. Nothing
true here, just days pricked for coins. Call it a life.
A passing carnival of blankness & deed.
Something yet dances out there in the shades,
dream stroke of a leaf, flame of a thigh.
Call her bitch. She responds.
Call her angel. She responds.
Wake up. To her bid a name less yawning.
Kneel. Submit. Love's immolation. Liberation's
ash. Wield the flame anew, call it music.
Dancing power aroar with the night.
Touch her feather. She responds.
Touch her leather. She responds.
Wake up. Someone else's world is
eating you while she arcs & corrodes.
A rampage, a terror, the night's floorless
embrace. Perpetual.
King's broad minions, preacher's tome of
nots, we listen & still slowly crack
wide. The artist barks tunefully, rests
later with cleanly brushed fur.
Kneel. Submit. Trees burn up in truth
where men mew & flee for anywhere.
My heart spits wildly for just a little content.
***
xvii. Sorrowful
Empire, relax. Blood bounces through the streets
again. Small things fallen lay open. Talk &
songs celebrate, lull, submit. Restless wonder
finds no home. Convulse, drift.
We want. We want. Something. Then something else.
Desire. Glare across a tome, wither of persistence.
Empire, relax. Casual tinkerings busy most.
Life eaten walking a path which does not arrive.
A world crackling its news tonight by bullet
& feather & spasm. Soft tightens around hard,
baubles & shrieks vie for believers. Kings
gallop over deserts a thousand years in forgetting.
In dreams I am chimes you steal from market,
the music in your satchel & scent. One heart
dreaming another.
Empire, relax. Hark human noise ever
burst out with melody or smoke. What great
passes, what small lingers. What little coming reveals.
Choked roaring with emptiness, years mount
& mock. The olden crumbles, retreats, reforms
elsewise, presses harder on. The olden lives
in tonight's kiss. Leaden blow. A rising thrust
within a quiet wood, still felt by a far
city staggering. Someone says quietly: we
all share the same soul.
In dreams I am your tinder, your scripture,
your flu. Conjuring me from hardly a parcel of
words yet see me appear. Itching & bruised. You make
me appear.
Empire, relax. All glory passeth, tomorrows &
tomorrows & tomorrows too. The world?s
remains surround king's winning horn in
fullest of moons, the waiting dust of
brother for brother. She conjures. I arise.
Another path beckons. Empire, relax.
***
xviii. Crippled
Once. Twice. Breathe. Relax. Now conjure
at will. Finger the shimmer in things.
Raise a telling strum, fail. Raise, & again.
Shriek for a swathe of yesterday flesh!—
an angle receding no magick can rightly trace.
Great eyes were praying kind to a moment.
Where is it? New pilgrims ride on. Join or
be damned. It hurts. Raise or dwindle.