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.

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.

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.