Helen on the walls

We fought for her, her hair
of raven or crimson or wheat,
her voice familiar or accented,
her skin pale or accentuated
by the sun, a thousand
ships with twenty men falling
to the sand or the shelf
of growing forests, or any place
at all that our sacrifice could
craft an altar of stone or air.

Her hair, her hair, her hair
like waves in the salted wind,
and when our eyes fell
lifeless
we were still in love.

Trying to explain

the unexplainable recesses and abscesses of memory,
the fingerprints of fists or wide leather leather belts
or wrenches,
the way that they were always drunk, how even
if they did not drink they were intoxicated
with their rage or violence or past,
and in their eyes was the fast-fade
of crimson food-coloring in a river
as an osprey’s talons clutched a trophy
in a competition without a recorded name,
and always afterward, their chests heaving from exhaustion,
the fire quelled, our misbehavior or existence culled,
they gave their mottled features over to the
ecstasy of brutality while we painted our faces
with the salt of eternal oceans.
If one could be beaten without feeling hated
then perhaps it would not be so bad.

Lament

Delilah, Delilah, did you not know
that if you had merely asked I would have
scraped my skull with shears?

If our love was never true, and your aim
always had held steady to thoughts of my betrayal,
I could have been told. On that afternoon
I would have held the current to my breast but
when the dolphins of the dithyrambist visited
their kindness would be refused. I would chase
the fleeing chariot’s tapestry until islands
and inlets became mirages, blown bubbles like a child
until my lungs were full and water became breath
and your indelible laughter reverberated in the ringlets
that I had kept, and we would give the hearts of the cresting
aquarian steeds over to the cause of the assassin.

When they come for my eyes I will scarcely be sorry
to have them gouged. For what reason should I keep
those possessions? Poetry is hollowed and
I care little for the sky and I shall not forget your face
until I depart this earthly prison for the bars of that death
which cannot be destroyed with toothy hacksaw strokes
or a torch blue as false friends or the irises of my love.

Fragments 4

When the last two entities in the cosmos
sit cross-legged to play at games of chances
they will still make wagers with stacks of precious metal.

______________________________________________

views looked at askance or, alternately,
crushed to powder beneath marble table lamps

______________________________________________

I wanted to batter bitter rhythms into the frame
of her house without receiving an invitation,
the way her old lovers do, but I have eaten the moon
whole and I for one shall give her nights to peace.

______________________________________________

even though the hands are palsied
and the wood of the piano was warped with age
and water and it will not hold a tune,
a song’s name vibrates in the air and it tremolos:
“chaos is truth is inevitable is progressive”

______________________________________________

“and who is this woman that you love?”
“she is qualia”
“oh. I see. good fucking luck with that.”

______________________________________________

I am carved up, like a goddamn pumpkin
that shall never be placed onto a porch.
I am carved simply because I am and one day
men in a large vehicle will take away my body
inside of a bag that cannot disappear.

_______________________________________________

swaddled like Christ in an ocean of blankets,
and her hands were as warm as my heart isn’t
and birdcages caused by the black of iron oxides
sang and danced on her skin through the dark

________________________________________________

like an immensely expensive guitar
that regally sits upon its stand
as it is never played

________________________________________________

like being in love, you are convinced of the veracity
of memory, but in the automobile accident of solitude
such beliefs are thoroughly concussed

________________________________________________

it is just like me to fall for someone
whose closest approximation is between
a wrecking ball and a da Vinci painting

________________________________________________

and thus the total of our lives become punctuation marks
to us, and though we sound un-tuned to the ears of each other,
by taking a little longer to pay attention to all things,
we see through cacophony that we have
by accident created a symphony

_________________________________________________

I kissed her once for each eyelid,
one for each dimple in her cheek,
and once for each strand of hair
that lost its fire in the candlelight.

__________________________________________________

not speaking to you is a war and its murder

__________________________________________________

Oh my sister I cannot even begin to imagine this world
and I have forgotten the name of our mother
and my life has engulfed a forest’s floor in flames
and because there are printed pamphlets
illustrating the intentionality of this controlled burn
(wait for a day without rain)
inquires are beaded and wiped away
like mercury from mirrors cracked on fault lines.

_________________________________________________

there was an armor to her cruelty
and she marched on like an ant with curiosity
but, linear to the end, she labored until
the sun again shook his head in shame
and drew a circle 'round his feet
then curled within in deathless sleep

__________________________________________________

sounds only clash when we cannot step
far enough away to see the chord

__________________________________________________

I know. And I understand. I am left with the idea
that one should never ask of a genie
more than two favors.

__________________________________________________

I saw my father in his violent eyes
but he was not my father
and so he could be killed.

_________________________________________________

one should only kneel in supplication
at the feet of a lover or else
the scimitar of the executioner

__________________________________________________

in dim light she fingers the nape of my neck
and runs her nails into my flesh and rolls over
like a cornered badger and I become paralytic
with fear when I see in her eyes a thousand demons

__________________________________________________

in a cascade for she had seen herself, a ghost

________________________________________________

Pan troglodytes – the denizens of the land below the land
who share desires with the god of wine

________________________________________________

Oh Anna, Emma, Lesbia,
the crickets write dirges while you rest.
The gunmetal clouds know all of your names
but I will pretend that they have not told me.

________________________________________________

The rails promised they would show fidelity
to their straight lines and one day she fell to them
and held the steel to its word.

________________________________________________

We cannot get out. We cannot get out.
We change our fingerprints on jagged flints held in relief
but not any semblance of color emerged
from what was to be our escape
and the walls of the cavern are endless.
Did we need to come here?

Fragments 3

black spirals of ruined paper
and in the distance a siren tolls
and I wonder if it legal here to burn

___________________________

The sun bakes pieces of pavement
along the traces started by
the refracted wavelengths of light.
The heat radiates images false as our gods
from a base of causeless thankless rock made molten
so that it could later be walked upon.

____________________________

lips of wine with a tongue of vinegar

____________________________

It is a singular subtle untruth, like the recording
of a lover’s voice scratched onto
mass produced speakers.

_____________________________

I never wanted to be a poet.
Whatever that is.

______________________________

a rose, my love, its bulb flowering
in the dark of an autumn night,
need only be brought out
when one wishes to tempt the thorns

______________________________

a voice like tattered sheets
as she drives away whispering
“you don’t mean that much to me”

______________________________

my fingers bled onto the strings bound to the maple
like a war god on an evergreen tree

______________________________

and their love was a vial of old cyanide
locked in a small chest which could be opened
by any key in the world

Devil

I. Dream

She asked if I would murder for love, and I brushed her hair
behind her ear and mumbled, half-removed from lucidity,
“Je suis assassiné tous les jours. Je peux rendre cela.”

We were laying on the floor; the only people in the world.
The remnants of the boys and girls that we had ceased to imagine
were heavy with the dew, like leaves or discarded garments.
Through an idle feat of focus we had made that room of ours
into the only room still standing. Elsewhere out there the time-worn
buildings were all as torn as the paper in school hallways on the first
true day of summer. The sun’s chariot lingers on such occasions.

Even if there had been a god attempting espionage for some nefarious,
vague purpose, It would have been paralyzed at the window.
She would have stood like a sorceress and enumerated the crimes
of these last ten thousand years. Her eyes would rivet It helplessly
to the windowpane, and while It desiccated like venison in the wind
on an October afternoon I would spill a glass of icy water.

She was soaring on a swing-set, then she leapt off and she said,
“I think everything about love is a trite fiction in our heads,”
then she breathed just like a hummingbird and in my arms
she was lithe and wild and carnivorous and I thought that
she might tear through my skin with pointed teeth
and so I waited. The architect of hell twisted in the sunset.

Then she disappeared in the death-throes of a train station
and she hovered on the benches with a cigarette
hanging from her perfect mouth or else between two
thin fingers. It is unsure who it is that we were,
but on a hallowed evening we masqueraded
as two hollow metal crutches and we assisted each other
as we limped across limpid suburban streets
with only painted lines to serve as guides.

We dyed our insides brown with whiskey. We made sparks
in the lanterns of the sprawling caverns of the world.
There were alarms in the early morning that were mimics
of the sunrise. We had locked that inevitability with our creator in a box
previously reserved for a woman of clay. She was strumming
a five-stringed guitar and we sang that we were not yet ready for time,
no, not at all prepared for that infinite energy carefully apportioned
into the spoonfuls of applesauce that wipe the sorrow from our lips.

She stood up and I felt aching in my bones. She took her sweater
from the floor and draped three heavy bags over her clothing and
became the colors of the dawn and the damned as the door closed.
I slowly unfold in the sun like a heathen king of antiquity
and wonder why the dryads in these dying trees
do not take the time to warn of catastrophe.

II. Divination

She was a farmer and in her fields were a hundred furrows
filled with corn that stretched higher than the reach of her arm.
That had been one part of her ambition, to have all the whiskey
that she could drink. Any paradise of value does nothing differently
from the mortal coil, save that it unwinds time like a golden wire
to give to the Chosen world enough to fabricate their heavens.
One of her figments of humanity, now long in disuse, had once
advanced the opinion that results were not penultimate;
that magnificence could be achieved by the machinations
produced in past days without expectation for a future.
Promptly she had banished him, and that night sat with a jar
hooked to her index and ring fingers and said to herself, for now
she was the last, “There is nothing free.”

She went walking the next morning. In the heat of the day
the moon still shone brightly somewhere in the East.
She had a group of horses that she no longer rode. Most of them
were in normal colors but a few were in lurid shades of red and blue.
There were dogs running in a meadow that was dotted
with dandelions that were used for food in centuries past but now
sufficed only to preserve themselves perpetually. Like many things
that also had outlived their usefulness, she did not destroy them
although it would have taken a mere snap of finger to thumb
to do so. Instead she kept to her custom and abandoned them
entirely to their own defenses. Although the flowers knew she no longer
cared for them they sacrificed their florets in attempts to brush
against her ankles or to land onto her palms or, oh rapture,
to be ensnared in her hair. She arrived again at her cottage
and came to her door from her stairs of fitted and smoothed boulders.

She took an Otis Redding vinyl record from its case and pierced
the first track with a needle. She took a drink from a clay jar
that she had cast on a wheel before painting upon it two X’s.
She never slept and she played guitar through the nights that she
permitted to occur and, though she remembered her words
as Narcissus remembers his cheekbones,
she never would sing something the same way twice.

III. Dimanche

He was sitting with a curved iron knife that was licking
the bark from a willow tree and through nights
illuminated by the uncountable corpses fastened
at blinding speeds to the void, every hour
like a clock-worked chime the blade would lose its edge
and he would take it as a lover’s lip between his teeth
and make of them a whetstone and the wood’s chips
became sandstone weeping like descending leaves.

His sanguinity raced itself to pool in clefts
left by an epoch of saltation. His carving
pushed an operatic timbre into the orchestra of dusk.
It beat the air in conquest of lust and betrayal.
Generations of men were pared off in crooked lines,
notched in a binary language that no one could read
and so they returned to carbon and nitrogen
and they had never truly been.

For six days he counted sins from the outside in
and peeled two hundred promises as the fragments
of the trunk ran down his arms like the bodies
of the Armenians on their short drop from shipboard
to the sea of the rishi Kaśyap. With a mighty groan,
the elder’s victory became clear and he directed his voice
to distant clouds. “The man to fell the last tree rooted
on Easter’s isle was daydreaming of girls with blue eyes.
He did not even hear the moment when the branches first
laid their sanguinary mouths to the dark dead earth
that had been a loyal nursemaid long before
the mothering and molting of the tallest mountains."

Though it once had strove like Babel, the highest point
of the last dying contrivance now was three feet
from the ground and, holding his breath, he punctured
the pad of his right index finger onto the spire.

The dull rumbling of static came to nothing
and the spirits of the stones turned to silence
from their elegiac strain and a wizened man
with eyes of pure white suddenly took the place
of the corpus of murdered timber. The god laid
propped onto his arm as if he were sitting for Goya.
He spoke in the low tones of a trumpet,
“My oldest friend, how have you been?”

The shade of ephemeral empire sheathed one of his weapons
and gritted his teeth for an instant before replying.
“Alright. All right. al-Right.” They laughed in the slow way
characteristic of men who have known each other too long
to find each other pleasant. The air escaping the man
with Medea’s eyes rattled like the wind passing through
the abandoned cloister of Oransay and with his maraca
he intoned, “You and I, oh ambitious one, are as proud
and useful as embroidery on a funereal shroud. I told you
of your future. Cassandra’s harp I gently plucked while
your hope degenerated into sanctified demise of heat
and now at long last you see that my soothing was not a mere
creation for my comfort. You can taste the blistered ocean,
hear the sound of nothing living, feel the soil that will never
again bear grass crumbling like palms in a furious
seismic oscillation, and every breath is of a conflagration.”

A sliver of ash was squeezed from the tip
of his life’s cigarette and his soul was riddled with splinters:
a bullet of ice, a club of gold,
a briefcase of things that cannot be sold.

The god chuckled, though it pained him,
took a flask of gin from the ether
and pulled juniper into his heart.
“I know that you have lived longer.”
The sage was speaking in the clipped malleable impressions
left by the cadence of horseshoes on a road of graphite
and crude oil. “I have come to abdicate. Fictitious Peter
at my gate sent to you what never should have been.
I had nearly forgotten who you were and this ignorance
is at my carotid like coruscant spurs and everything
is rust and this earth is not enough for us.”

The devil shrugged and stood six feet tall and blinked his eyes.
A god turned into fireflies that did not know to shine goodbyes
to proteins never meant to fold. They beat their wings
into the unbound cold and with nothing gained
and nothing lost their faces turned sharply into the frost.