047: Homecoming

Between cotton walls of grey

caravans trail and trod along

a flat earth nailed to paper skies,

marked with kurgans of giants,

mantled by glitters of cold,

decelerating just a bit

to usher in an age of questions.

Within sublime frequencies,

the movement never ceases

and shaking teeth keep grinding

with consummate dendrites

for the invisible door,

sat one step beyond

the mating point of sea and sun.

Striving to net parhelions,

our roots are touching rock,

with every dawn and every war,

yet we'll hold fast, like blades of grass,

each crashing wave,

each footprint laid

in swiftest sands the wind won't name.

046: Torn

Extract the truth,

like a tooth

- a fire lash

outstretching

the horizon -

and drive the sword,

though the sea boils

with icebergs

charred.

The house I built

with sprinkles

of heaven

and pockets of forever,

between subway stations,

insane with wine,

drunk with madness,

loosens

at the seams.

My harbor

from atom storms,

forgive me,

as my days

are links

of bronze chains;

swimming

in the quicksand,

these astral rooms

have everything but doors.

A blessed life,

my heart's tempest,

the dream tempted

to compress infinity

in single

seconds

and no beacon

in the distance.

Slaving in freedom,

burning in thirst,

a vice of the soul -

I still shun this cup;

I know not;

I deny;

unkempt, unquenched,

mirror nemesis.

045: Living inside me

Standing on the pier

that pierces the seam

of a sea of stone,

sacrally alone,

starflesh dives the rim.

Breathing caves of fear,

housed in crumbling lungs;

if I dare pry,

hear the crystal cry,

bells of waking rung.

Trickling dusk draws near

and heralds the dark night,

lightning in the soul,

imprint in the coal,

the end in living light.

Stabbing steps do sear,

disease march 'cross the ice,

every breath, a knife,

still, the kiss of life,

building paradise.

044: Words for weak flesh

Awakened

by somatic whispers,

cavern lung

caving in,

coiled by the black,

every breath,

a shovel racking

moist mud.

Strings of seconds,

shapeless, nameless,

rendering language useless,

always present

at the hours' cross,

sickness is,

silence exists,

clawing at the sun,

creeping through the seams.

Full speed ahead,

into the ice,

oceans of onyx

prepare the trail;

today,

tomorrow,

yesterday,

a memory

blown away

by a sour mistral.

This is a war

of still frames,

never fatal,

always wounded,

gleefully sullen

beneath a nova sky.

Ballast emote,

blast of emotion,

say the word

that's yet to be,

wriggling through the red

into the blinding

filament,

incandescent,

carrying on,

drown,

explore,

indulge / resist.

043: For a second, the world stopped.

There was agitation below,

splatter of leaves in stuttered colors

as the pendulum swung,

from nadir to zenith.

Rushed by vectors of joy,

a snapshot cyclone caved the bridge

only to raise it anew,

astray, yet cognizant.

Lifted the lid, in ache,

to the obsidian blade, wrought red,

smitten by the sun

before a perfect dawn.

And the child laughed,

his pearl mouth, straight from a scripture,

while darkness, amoebic, snug in,

like a pet, in his warm absence.

Within the morning gleam,

blood seeped through his feather crown,

along the scaly coils,

for dust to coalesce.

It took seasons in seconds

to remember the myth I never forgot;

and throughout the confines,

sleepless chains shook.

You whispered it gently,

in dual incarnations, guiding light azure,

thus, infernal and tender,

I will rest in awe.

042: Healing dance

Information amok besieging the gates of reason,

a stop sign is ignored in spiteful fashion,

ask questions but sometimes the answer is blank,

drifting on the river, fishing fragments of passion.

At the end of the hallway there's an unlocked door,

winding steps fly into equilibrium,

tectonics intact from petrified pumping,

still seeking the flame, burn cryptosporidium.

In a late hour, bleeding, reality serrate,

from the ramparts I still see myself, not lost,

with a silver bullet gun to banish demons from the mirror,

from sweetest lips, never ignore what matters most.

041: No name

Black pearls washed ashore,

runes carved in driftwood

from an island without trees,

pins on a map, epicenter

of a mythical nowhere,

solar tears whence the sky

drinks the sea dry.

Words about words,

tempt to paint a lash

in Mayan blue, no rhyme,

a wake so dark, a fall so deep,

awake or dreaming

lost in fog, a reality,

in questions of time spent.

Spitting out cupfulls of bile,

black lung haunted by fear,

look into the rising sun,

beyond shivering green,

a wordless answer lurks

where white whales spurt

and the moon drowns.

040: 3 days

Within the halls of seeping time,

in the glare of your footsteps,

tonight, on such a sacred night,

my soliloquy resonates so barren;

there's no answer form these tender bricks,

the veins of my temple are sewn shut.

Silver serves the red, to open the skin

of a butterfly wing, of a crimson king,

of an animal fighting its shadow

for the last splinter of sanity.

The night decays, yet you fail to see

how the fireplace caresses still

a newborn ember from yesterday,

petrified to a fractured rhythm;

I don't fear the winter, freeze my tears black,

for you may destroy this temple,

but it will be raised anew,

with every dusk and every dawn,

until the moon drowns away

in silence.

039: Hours passed in exile

Again and again, faces dance,

music helps, still condemns,

visible husk gets banned, inject

the serum of empty days, cutting blade,

the soft fabric of todays, elastic

against a hungry vortex,

a faint eye, library of pain on paper,

selfcollapsed beneath its weight,

a volcanic cenotaph stands

where the crowning jewel

should be.

Waiting hours, days and seasons,

waiting for the snow to flee,

for gold to enter the cathode sky,

to wish upon an icy star

for an earthly paradise,

sweating to hold handfuls of utopia

to build a structure

that renders tomorrow benign,

pointless within the absence

of answers, a celebration

to the fall of the word.

[title borrowed from Dark Tranquillity's eponymous song]

038: For the second time

Last night I watched again

my own stake

in slow motion blaze

from the bottomless bog,

then drifting further

on the polished onyx,

away from clouds of flesh,

albatross air cleans the sweat.

Using crash logs

as ocean maps

to the chapterhouse of failures,

collections in agony

and the guillotine blade drenched

in azure, from the veins

of the invisible,

a saline aftertaste.

I scrawled with incisors

and lifeblood from the cavity

in the heart of everything,

the precision of creation,

ironcast cybernetic

like glacier lakes,

with nitrogen rage

beneath the mantle.

037: Life in the shallows

In the shallows, writhing,

in the shade of concrete reefs,

fish colonies migrate

in clockwork cycles,

dead hand precision

beneath uncaring gaze,

salty, liquid today,

the dance of anemones reflects

the demons' tar,

the dark side of mirrors.

Tomorrow, the dawn of triumph

will take us all away

into the blue,

yet the flame's still unconsummed

the epic of my pitch,

unwritten.

Fish swirl around in steel tornadoes,

but I cannot give birth

to so needed new words

for a cardiac language.

Pearl fishers from the other side

observe seconds

of these fleeting lives,

another fold

in the same veil;

and the doused embers are voiceless

as lightning sparks run

through Ranvier nodes,

on highways of grey,

never far enough.

Words fail again

to redeem the mute,

before the reach of dreams,

the thrust of exile, when gills unbreathe,

so I'll paint the blue

with burning oil

and elect silence

as my new tongue;

as long as these fibers pump and grind

I know I'll never die.

036: Dissolution of the unborn

From beyond ramparts of time

and columns of rue,

they sing and call to their mother,

echoes storming the firmament of bone,

their song to my pain, the words I never said,

winter flesh, siamese grief.

Beneath the roots of my castles,

their frail bodies linger,

bugs traced on a windshield,

bellowing deep, till I fall asleep,

build my temple of dreams

stone by stone, preciously,

a religion of images iced, sanctified.

My children, stretch your watery wings,

for the abyss knows your names

the way I never will.

I'd force the arms and stress the springs back

to return to the source, the starry womb,

for every word unsaid,

every glance unreached,

every line not crossed,

every name not written.

In golden sand, the imprint of your mother's face,

her unbearable beauty

still burns like an open wound.

035: My only carriage

Tonight the asphalt seems to cushion my steps

as I'm trailed by a procession of bards,

weightless and smooth,

bearing fiddles like feathers,

poised for a touch.

Tonight my lagging limbs feel lighter,

animated to a thought,

a nimble leprechaun laughing crystalline,

carefree below observant chords

in the moonlight glaze.

Tonight I can hear firewood crackling

in my abode of loneliness;

and those present in faint corners mean no harm,

for we're still young, we still have time

and our song still glides above the waves.

034: We will never meet again.

Step by step on the electric treadmill,

an electric tombstone epergne

in a funeral of watts and what ifs,

cask laid bare like a pirate ship

ghosting in the unbreezed milk, without refusal.

And few extol the throbbing thread

of vivid smudge by sprawling palms - tendril tight,

internal to digest the charging tides

that ooze and roll throughout

lives of commutes and numbed prayers,

in conked out breath, condemned and wishful;

lifelines connected in needle eyes,

sowing strips of spent skin and dried digits,

seams in desert camouflage outfits

and noose neckties curdling a dirge pattern.

Another pint of Greek fire concurs,

submerging the candle, nurturing the rage

to spit in saturnine hunger with a stabbing spine

spitefully built against the dexter branch.

Hark! Your fixtures are graves of ice,

your speedways slope into incisive winds

that jag against our fragile flesh,

so boil and distill - and let only such elect few

as pollen drops be spared from consumption,

for flashlights are futile in the conquering dusk,

appropriated house of fog, where hunters stalk and nail

mere exhales of long-gone gods;

in the churchyards and broken plains

of this earth never will you find me.

033: New Text Document (4)

In the mug,

the coffee's dried

to crust.

In the air,

summer smells

like rot.

Down the aisle,

nothing but

a blank wall.

In memories,

the glow

of a flame.

How do you

say hello

with a smile?

How do you

think goodbyes

open-eyed?

And the gold

burns my hand -

still clenched.

And the longing

drifts and whirls

like sand.

Let the night

slowly creep

from the sea.

Let the light

dim away

into sleep.

Reaching higher

than towers

of glass.

And my footsteps

are my only

companions.

032: Midnight sun

A day of more, a song of meeker noise

that gently weaves upon my inner ear,

a whisper bailed to slip in deeper poise.

Against the strain, to falter skulking ploys

and bring down towers of encroaching fear,

a day of more, a song of meeker noise.

By tender touch, affable vaster joys

and bosky groves so still - and drawing near,

a whisper bailed to slip in deeper poise.

That day I'll pass the plays of girls and boys,

pursuing inklings far from savage drear,

a day of more, a song of meeker noise.

The blasting gale that graven stone destroys

will never rake this image I hold dear,

a whisper bailed to slip in deeper poise.

Redemptive notes from trumps of dream envoys

in velvet dawn will find my vision clear,

a day of more, a song of meeker noise,

a whisper bailed to slip in deeper poise.

031: Perched on the sill

In a slow scuttling breach,

mild leer of shimmer peak,

toast to the health,

as dragons clash,

and obfuscate face in silver shards.

Lance a rope ladder

to the tempest rush,

broken bottle neck dibs

a bronze coin flip.

Dam sour streams in my pulsing bulk,

in his drain I've slaked

far too long.

Screwed driver, asleep

on the wheel, stern against

tender innards.

I've ground and gritted to karst

on muck road miles

on the science of fiber in action

to botch revolutions,

springs spun sinister,

undone metabolic.

I've mustered mobs and armies,

filling nil with clamour from their mouths in rot

and parting brakes to gauge

whether the sun will fuse

feathers of lead.

Read canine spill scribbled on pages

of diaries oiled sky crimson, to expand function,

outstep logic

and razor rust dull;

and who would align to seek debris of me

in the resplendence

left over when the grime is purged?

030: Stand at the crossing

Hang

and bleed

in the unknown.

Red line focus,

twist the neck

and plant

colors of war

on a wave battered shoal.

Power vertex structure

of maternal ground

I raise

as my jade lifemask.

In weakness,

so strong.

While the scattering

runs on

all around,

chasing the light

across cold void,

I'll wallow in

the black unseen.

His aeon fingers secure

my speck of sand

as whole

as can be,

in the mind of a man,

in the heart of a child,

in the eye of a mouse,

roaming the field.

Demons deny,

turning face,

turning back.

The granite star

is a mouth ever-hungry

to replenish desire.

Don't stop.

Don't break.

All I possess,

reduction to unreason,

wish to mire

rotating arms.

Field mice dream

of being children.

Children dream

of being men.

Men dream

of sleep.

[last 2 lines adapted & expanded from somebody's Y! messenger status message]

029: Levers & cogs

Drink away the night hours

in fume fried brick bowels

and sing to mend an aching back

and a staggering dream path,

with the drained withstanding

of plastic film marked,

waxwork heartsease kicked in the groin.

How long can this conversation wander

before the fracture erupts

and the slimming seams can't hold out

the shimmering rain any longer?

How quick can I spin this bottle

to match the revolution of a silver barrel

sporting five vacancies?

Still mooring of sultry arms

stripped by morning blades,

a free ticket to the house of exile;

rebuked bill sticks to my neck, ink ingrained,

as I roll the boulder uphill,

the ticking haunts, unfading,

the noise of the world.

Condoned in cardiac entrapment,

lung wrestling and touch duels,

within gene strands, smoke grappling calisthenics.

Yet, should the burning wheel retort

I'll burgeon my spider legs, I know,

to stride the glass divide,

fleet-footed slip to the other side.

028: The flower thief

With trembling hands on the viscid scape,

to never spoil a precious petal,

pickpocketing sights in subway cars to relive,

to recreate card chapels of sincere prayer,

of unbecoming words trepid of loss.

Modulate memories in gold and black like she was,

thoughts to fornicate in sagging anthills,

escalade in grasshops a private mountain

straying the escarpment of a lost Naraka

whence cells crystallize in human tidbits to be

a feeble abode of instinct and love

and culled fear, skulking in cherry groves.

Here, a collection of coincidences

ascribed to paths of stars and cold bodies,

in a neonate game, older than my forefathers;

here, a bardo trap, a keep of comforts

of empty presents from a wishlist in tar

that spells like a last will protruding

through cracks in my undying joy.

Within gardens of evil and hope,

roots of rage reel to acquire frail flowers,

pollen of pictures in blood ringing

on the limbs of butterflies washed in sunfire.

Test the finites of absolution, alpha and omega

in one single consummate image, nerve induced

through the pupil of the third eye.

027: Amber

I subtract another brick

from the dank foundations

of your mansion cenotaph

to coalesce spazzed tension.

It collapsed in seaward breeze

as a waiting game missed,

reveal your features binary,

your tempest embrace dissed.

Distraught your elysian effigy,

rooted guilt in seams;

now and in aeon moonskin denied

the solace of the mean.

Inner workings of a manic queen

spearhead in vision songs,

occult forgiveness the earth knows,

lead us where we belong.

026: Empyrean damp

The tape is torn today.

Attire your life, still fits like a glove

encapsulated in blood tartan bearing threads,

autumn leaves shelling finite encompassing.

Knuckles redden in the mud of jest songs,

commuted ends of microscopic worlds

and wishful violence - butterfly wings.

According to nails, a vertical borehole

from the stem that aborts sandstorms,

you dig and dig, towards the black bone,

to find a scoreboard answer dry.

Tag. You're it.

Full speed ahead and the captain shouts

restraining orders, passengers selectively deaf,

blue murder sprinkled on cone cells.

Re-emerge from the drill shaft to find a dimness stained,

displacing stars, an iridescent graffito spells fracture.

Shoot you down with my silver bullet file,

inside your protection reach, a trail of cruelty,

shovel shallow graven, in a shallow riverbed

of trickling salt, raise you a new home

in an arctic stalactite confessional.

Tag. You're out.

Wear liquid red

against the grey

and drain the storm

caught in the fray,

alleviate

our words' decay.

The tap is closed today.

025: Numb and numbered

Toddling tide already worn,

swim in faces, reading episodes

of ache flicks and ether exits,

in a precise drift silence signals

a sniper reloading datum trace.

Her length and width to southern winds,

we count in seconds that won't sit still,

hypertension housed in heavy husks,

landlocked within shelves of stardust,

intimate whispers mantling cathedral walls

upheld by matchstick counterforts.

Glints in grinning eyes shed light

on catapults of word and bone

with torment tongue armed, milk white,

chalk black cadaver silhouette,

but candor ships sway tenderly,

just beyond the morning rim.

Play chords in red, cast self in sleep,

the music of mountains built on clouds,

hear and see with concrete sense

a ravaged circuitry bouquet,

killing fields of fear and desert dissent

playing for keeps, praying for rain.

Paste on the pavement a human smudge,

a fragile grace steals my breath away;

never account for a ruminant string,

we'll ride to the sun on wings of night.

024: One noise

Acid whimper

corrodes concrete

and angels speak

in sprawling tongues.

Refine vision

in saltwater lens,

before the gates,

request astray.

Salient roots

through barren soil;

crumpled Atlas

to the weight of all.

Array the nails

to shape a crown,

with absent mounts,

a cavalry charge.

Temple shores

reached in time due,

to drink the sea,

absorb the clouds.

Blossom of blood

springs from my bones

to color these walls

in violent dawn.

023: Amphibians

In good hiding, sullen damp dwell,

in black paint behind glass, behind eyeballs,

in tender flesh, coiled 'round rugged bone,

'round spines of strangers I know well;

think you can tell the scalpel swirl

from a puncture wound in the sun's skin,

raped in stoke, reaped in smoke,

this man-made geology carousel

spins us all out of control, autonomy spilled on walls

cold, concrete fall like machine music.

Locked cobweb can-can in crumbling opium dens,

our obtuse, trussed livid bodies,

obscene eye peering through the lens of a noose,

as I know your name, you know mine,

yet we're caecilians to the play above,

beyond the reach of the Methuselah moth,

cellular lives in bardo, years in the clock's tick tock,

tongues will be mute before the echo,

the poison will dry before the ocean.

022: Ever newborn

We crossed blades of grass,

crossed blazing sands and permafrost,

crosses' bipolar digest steeped along the road.

I exiled your secrets in the carnation of a butterfly,

omens of a petal pandemonium, greyspoken in black tongues,

sculpt a thorn whirlwind in the bowels of a nourishing tuber.

Together we used to pierrot and curse our echoing halls,

dug and ground through generations of rainfall,

as I would imprint vivid memories of you on petrified trunks.

Your sly sihlouette, nimble cryptid,

within carbon domes, mythos uterus spawn,

still contorts my logic; blood sylphen,

let's swim a leaden transgression in feather snowstorms.

I witnessed autumn blossoms painting rage across your brow,

reverse salvation, clock disarmed,

all the while you suckled at the sunset's throat,

whispers preserved in amber amnios,

your cyclone pining windpipe to fertilize Jupiter's womb,

to shine your life unto constellations far beyond the anvil flow

these Hyde clouds sweat in mouths of expired soil.

Save your request to repair quartered royal lines,

for metric symmetry took breath right here,

in the pattern origin where your song did reverberate,

serrated against solid walls damp, so silent

and my cry collapsed in molten wax, to turmoil bellowing below.

You'd wither should the sun reach your innocence.

021: Alchemy

Black hole

fold back to waves

of noise monoxide synod,

restate and return,

Fibonacci reversed,

to the rocking hand,

to a gentle hell.

In a struck pose, basalt doze,

breadcrumbs on frozen lava steps,

all the way to the mantle of the sun,

where the thread dies, the monolith melts.

Incandescent words,

cables dissolve

and to vapor ships' song we dance.

How do you feel about this stray note,

the shattered basalt lock,

orogeny of our souls

in the harmony of chaos.

Dislodged, defunct

architects of shrines,

photonic sequence stems

from their quiet graves;

my libel 'gainst the soil

drawn on silver lids, dispatched by aching meat,

across cold voids unseen,

whence no lungs drink.

Beyond ramparts of ash,

to the translucent bustuary

in his nuclear heart.

020: Merde de nom

You know my name, the one we share,

you did suspect a thread, osmium chain, weightless,

with the weight of fire bearing on my back.

Portraits bloomed in the bark of trees and dogs,

yours is housed within my bones,

within the burgeoning tendril rose.

But that which burns my fingertips chars my head,

I'd char my hand in the black box,

I'd choke them with the primeval astronaut cord.

Tribulations and plots against architecture,

devised in the hour of the minotaur,

seconds that time forgot, times infinity,

to the rhythm of temptations, to banish fibrillations,

bang the drums of war, bang the heads on walls.

All the ruminations, all the grime,

entwined 'round the spine, mirrored in obsidian.

And as I curse my face of glass on your marble flesh

the circuitry collapses without haste,

the letter of light slowly inverts to point the way,

all trudging mercenaries, ragged,

chasing desultory splinters of their lives,

while my scope was smudged,

they know my name, the one we share.

019: While the world sleeps

Every evening, as the light sinks dim,

armies march homeward in cardboard discipline,

on the crests of waves through lunar seas of salt

to the cadence of recurring dreams

and the tepid isostasy of illusions.

Every morning, as the noise explodes,

the whipping hand quakes the cradle

and bottom deals a newborn flaming wing,

I take it for a walk, a ride, a flight

beyond steps and seas and silver lines.

Then the lid is regrown, the chrysalis resown,

sprawling dusk heralds the lachrymal feast

for Icarus, motionless in the perpetual abyss.

Egressing these frail walls on tippy toes,

I leave to dream of the blue curtains she wore.

018: Naunet

She marches at high noon,

golden cross on strong back;

a leaden tick-tock clamours her presence

to all living witnesses.

Strength of the sea, shining bronze waves

ride to the night and other lonely places,

through branches or through roots,

but it's no coincidence.

Below the velvet, tense fibers;

strings collude to bridges

and my wishes bloom in the sultry moor,

under the warm, dark cloak.

017: Black water / Winterdance

I stared down the severed neck of an antarctic exoskeleton

into reflexive waters that thirst for moonlight,

no echo made it back, fish and fishermen extracting

glum notes from the cayman's jaw grip.

Shoelaces and tongues tied in an effigy of disorder,

inviting me to dance the scalpel can-can in clinic waiting lines;

I declined politely,

as they were numb to the workings behind sclerotic curtains.

Your name, exotic, ringing of distances and fractured meanings

superimposed on the desert masonry of my nail-carved chapel

and the epiphanic wake left me to wonder the icefields,

stormwatching for signals of all too familiar alien life.

Adorning my wall, golden calculus table to determine

whether to apply that soothing litany;

maybe the polar twin of my nemesis is impervious.

Spotting the angels in the architecture of deathbeds

seems to have become the new national sport,

for soft-spoken words are blood kin

to those silent waters.

016: Plowing the fields

Velvet concrete drawn, yet the voice lingers on,

drilling rusted joints for anointment oil

to bless the spiral word meteor

adored in doomsday clock cult cogs.

Hushed in oxide parlours,

a colorless rainbow to hang from;

hear the waves, fear flavored,

mother the conjectures of revolutions,

in ebbs and flows, chart peak mountaineering.

Subject in silence, nerves meet air,

exposed in the flaming wireframe,

shoulderblades to sever the neck.

Aeries loom above the inside,

third eye retinal scan, the obscene abyss

reflects starlight from hell's firmament.

If I'd build a bronze serpent from the ashes of the unborn

to douse the radiance of the night

and terraform dried candlefields,

wouldn't such absence bleed the vision

with toxic subsequence?

Dip the spear in tranquil ebullience,

monotony is but covert self-fulfilling prophecy,

while correction fluid stains the body (subtly),

one can trace antidote formulas

in the secret discourse of tenants of wings.