Song

A silver Cytherean nymph, its wings translucent
like a dragonfly seen through sunlight,
skimmed on the surface of desolate cornfields
whose beloved stalks had felt the solemn kiss of the scythe.

Her eyes were mourning like the dew. The dawn had pressed
its fingers through a lattice that had not remembered
to accept the growing tangled vines or mountains
with their dying spines.

Using gold-capped crooked teeth, she pulled a thread
from ancient sheets and wrapped it soft inside her hair
(her heart and mine like breasts
laid bare upon the thin veneer of love affairs).
She trembled and on a rough-hewn hedge
of stolid stone she began to sing:

Fisher King, Fisher King,
are your empty nets the fault of the sea?

Leaves

In past years I would walk silent until a twig snapped
beneath my feet (in leather boots to protect ankles
from the fangs of the serpents that crawl
in venomous haste from their normal homes)
and I would stretch my hands like a minor god
and pull a leaf from Yggdrasil and feel its veins
like the tendons that allow a lover’s fingers
to flex from the wrist and then rend away vascular promises.

The forest took portions of my breath as I fell into a sigh
and wild turkeys like a shattered sky scorched the air
with their beating wings and I tore linearly at
that which I had killed until tiny shreds were all that remained.
There was not a burst of cold fury directed at my bitter,
murderous actions, for the earth is a woman and knows
not how to be violent and calm at once, but I felt its hatred
and knew it to be deserved and there were demarcations
placed to preserve this irreparable savagery although
on the ground a million of its cousins had already perished.

Because I am alive I know that the world has at long last
tired and wishes for release, and so I slash at any verdant thing
and the rain whipping in the wind was caressing
the crevasses in the city’s streets and sending dead branches
careening to the bayou’s open arms and I knew that
it soon would take me too. Although I know how to swim
drowning is not so bad if the water with a film of ice
shudders in fear at the temperature of flesh.

Carmen 5

the thread from which a cord is woven
a note in a song never sung

A History of November

I. Kristall

One can find forgiveness for forgetting that Tchaikovsky
wrote in praise of any other month as on weakened streets
tennis shoes lurch like metronomes and coffee burns into mouths,
and once-fearsome insects with their barbs lend their flights to lethargy
and their circling seems lazier than past years as if they know
that the next spring will bring news of a red queen, a dead queen
(regicide so rare these days)
and cousins with book lungs full of pesticides
with their crimson hourglasses or drab earth-tones,
and then neurotoxins flash like a fire to a newly opened door
and the clouds all fled and the stars
were infinite in their tiny crystals
of storefront glass or a million tears
and it was the beginning,
and one too can be forgiven for wondering which Mephistopheles
Pyotr had encountered on his way to painting the future.

II. Walking


The volcanic creep of her breath that pulled poison slower than beauty
through mass produced paper cartridges of affliction was disconcertingly
enchanting and her hands were cotton dipped in the steely breath
of arsenic and I kissed the sugar on her palms in a prayer
and I waited for the wind like Sleipnir in His haste
but perhaps the wise one would not choose to ride this year.

My love sustains herself on sunsets. She wonders at the moon,
so much more frightening now than in her childhood
when its crescent made a torch of her smallest finger,
and thinks of the water of a vacant sea as it laps
its thousand tongues (blacker than the sails of Theseus’s return,
mere calories from freezing) onto sand too terrible
for the fragility of wintered lunacy.

The sunrise turns from vapor and provides refuge
for Russian tyrants and the earth wraps a belt around Her hips
and shudders in the first mornings where frost gives its
mesh of mail to the leaves of sweetgum trees and the air
grows in hatred and the goddess has her vengeance.

The theft is felt by all (eternally chipping away at our oilcloth windows
with unpared fingernails) and the only defense for Prometheus comes
from the demon-blue of her voice and suddenly the threat
of ice-bitten toes seems trivial and laughable
and we close the eyes of the dead because we do not wish
to learn of certain secrets.

III. Memory

There was a girl with black hair. There was a girl and she was paler
than ghosts and she could be seen to-and-from school waiting for her bus
or else getting off of her bus, and later she dyed her hair
but that color is not remembered just as the number of her bus is not stone-etched,
and later she died and for the first time her name was recorded in electricity
but it too is lost, although it has by now probably been given to many more girls.

Some of them may have had hair like ravens at twilight and perhaps
they too grew to hate a face framed in midnight and if they have not died yet
then they surely shall. If more justice was in the world then these new spirits
with older names will have the luxury of burying their parents before they
climb to their own tombs, one in pine and another in oak and another in
iron-bound elm, and, above, there would be angels or modest squares
or towering spires of concrete and on each of their markers they would
have slight allegiance to another family (a composition of strange notes
that are jarring without being dissonant).

They sit at a locked gate without knowing if they desire
what lies behind its curves or even if it shall be the last bar in their path
as they wait for erosion. The leaves of autumn are wept but do not
find regret as a bloody blanket delicately wraps the feet
of an ancient maple tree after a storm.

Rapping on Halloween

I.

We were in a room and the door could not be fully
opened because a chair blocked it and most of the people
had left when the blue lights like unwanted strobes pulsated
through windows and the haze of cigarette smoke
and in the beer spilled on the floor or poured as foam.
For perhaps twenty minutes we sat and there were these three
that were feeling pleased with themselves for having a mediocre
free-styling rap battle while I nodded my head in chemical bliss
and one of us who was less ambitious asked if they could throw out
some words about anything that was chosen, like my neighbor’s
New York Yankees hat, and they tried their best and it was formulaic
and eventually they exhausted themselves and I tapped my foot
as I swayed a little in my chair and I took a deep breath
and my voice was like running fingers through the hair
of someone condemned to death with a fate in the depths

and I said

II.

“That guy to my left just tossed a rhyme about shoes,
and just about that, like a criminal bruise,
about shooting motherfuckers like the Germans to Jews
and laying a lyrical track that read just like the news.

We were gonna talk about a fucking Yankee cap,
I can start with its colors, black on black,
or how its brim is straight or how it’s snug in the back
but I don’t really give much of a damn about that

I like how he talks about that chrome four-four
but I’m more interested in if he was ever poor,
if he ever had to sleep right on the goddamn floor,
if his mother ever got tossed through a door,

‘cause I know what he says cannot be true
or there would be no one for you to talk to
after their souls got tossed up into the blue
and humanity was like something Picasso drew.

III.

“And the man to my right he is Mexican,
and the man to his right is African,
and I know that we say that a man’s a man
but I gotta question that, when in a foreign land

there are priests with the power of death and of life
and the Catholic Church reads the people their rights
as they tell them that condoms spread HIV/AIDS
and to quit all that fucking is an easy band-aid

that we can just pull off, like wrath or like sloth,
or gluttony, avarice, and all of that stuff
that got banned by a man that sits on a throne.
Don’t forget his predecessors crushed people with stones

or that they burned them alive or killed them with swords
or threw them in prison, like they did to the whores
who were just gonna make a little hard money,
and if it wasn’t true maybe it would be funny

to recount this verbose history with vapid MC’s
who sit on couches and pretend to be free
and with sub-par hooks they try and coach me
to believe in someone that they cannot be,

these legends of hands grasping pistol grips
and a dangerous temper like the master’s bullwhip.
Do you know anything about what’s real in the world,
or are your words like love stories you tell to the girls

that you don’t care about? You’re so goddamn hard,
like making a house from a deck of thin cards,
but in your eyes is a person who’s been alone,
who lived a long time without a house or a home,

and I wonder about the edge on your claws
and if you will dull them trying to climb up walls
to avoid all the things that you cannot back up
or if, instead, you just don’t give a fuck.

Now you’ve got a position on this rap’s chessboard
but I can sense that our friends here are all getting bored
so I’ll wrap this in plastic high up on a shelf
and see how much more you talk about yourself

instead of the vote in California
for the legalization of marijuana
or the hatred of our brothers who only love men
or our sisters hated for just loving women

but maybe that shit doesn’t matter much at all,
like the hungry kids that you shrug at in the halls
of the buildings where you sell their young mothers crack,
and I wonder if you ever bother looking back,

or if you just make that money like the paint on the floor
that no one can clean. If it’s there, it’s yours.
Now I’m back at his hat, so if it’s back it’s back.
Where the fuck in this house can I find a dime sack?”

IV.

I had silenced them and our souls were set afire.
I left the room, wedged through the barely open space,
and I saw her face. Her name was palindromic
and she said she was a marionette but her corset
would have caused envy in Madame Antoinette
and her face was pale with the spirit of the day
and on each side of her mouth were black lines like tears
or tears in her skin and she twisted her left ankle when she spoke.

I left shortly after making her acquaintance. I walked
home in the dark of the cardboard clouds on beds of dead leaves
and I kicked their drying doom at barking dogs and dared the demons
to give me kisses on such an auspicious morning but my lips were
hollow with the wind and then I was alone again.