Distant ringing of a telephone unanswered

We shared a grandmother
when the earth was not new, like us,
but middling, like her,
And we were footnotes
in an attic of memories,
As time spun us all.
Beneath the glass, age advanced
to shadow it, the light no longer emanating within her.
Crepe fingers gathered black cobwebs
and they said something that was
Not a simple few contractions:
"Grandmother has withdrawn from London permanently,"
and so did my heart;
but I could not pin back my hunger for her.
We have lost an age, which was never ours,
a cocktail of nostalgia and bitters,
and the one we have, we cannot contain,
the future lapping ever at the brim.

Natural Selection

Children will grow without us;
In towers, forests, and tulips.
Children will grow in spite of us;
Abandoned to wolves and witches,
they adapt and grow wise.
Children will grow to destroy us;
With their terrible pity,
new tomorrows,
and unenchanted mirrors.

The razor tight rope I walk for love,
Drank the repentance spilt from my knees;
These hands that cannot pray unless they hold him,
Bound the prayer cord about my hips like a chastity belt,
Cutting off circulation.
The saints hold me like a wounded thief on the cross,
Telling me the hows & whys don’t matter in sacrifice,
If I trust to the ends of creation;
But the song of glory is stuck in my throat,
And I will not render unto God what is his.

Uninhabited

My heart cannot contain the frailty that makes it falter,
nor the solar plexus sustain the force of your glance,
a hollowing without breath between my lungs.
Each gasp of swollen mouth, a wound agape,
cauterized by your kisses, cored by your tongue--
Devoid of both, a calcified shell of skin,
Whispering of wellsprings spent.
Your lust and loathing, in equal measure,
leave me insensible as ether.
The pulse you palpitate beneath your hands
is unequal to the occasion.
The hunger in my belly is
not satiated by what I consume,
But what consumes me.
Love is in the empty, the ache of what is not
within me.

Boldness

"Be bold, be bold, but not too bold"
An act of light, the love I gave you,
blinding prudence with scintillation,
And you bade me follow you home.
The road to hell is paved in white stones.
Moonlight shrouds the red
of tooth and claw,
Like a well-drest beast.
You pawed at me in primal ravening,
Pinned my wrist beneath your hunger,
which was my right, and all you left.
The remains of other affairs mounted above your mantle,
Wedding bands still attached to hands;
A grim chiromancy.
But girls go on without hands, heels, tongues:
we endure and escape to bear witness,
if only in drops of blood along the path,
calling to those who would not be victims.

"Years go by..."
It is a convention we must accept
of both fiction and life.
Literature operates like memory;
It is most effective
when evocative
and inaccurate.

ideation
she was porous in talking;
each word a higgs particle,
slipping around heavy ideas.
a thing may have several causes;
summing in a synapse.
like neuronal communication,
we are a sum of science & theory.
doubt not the world is a construct of faith,
or you will be caged by your own perception;
another dead cat in an invisible box.

We release our teeth, satiated insects,
blood swollen stomachs
translucent, truculent.
Our words peel away like bark;
Those birches
(from Japanese prints)
were first from nature
and so were we.
Artists names translate
into windows
commandments to seek
their work in life
but our compound eyes are glassed,
and our jaws yet drip.

Primer Printempts
The stirring
virescence
of new grass,
counterpoint
to the impossible
promise of leaves
shooting,
dandelions bursting,
in florid lemon tufts.
All that is crisp
and tender
bears the
burden of breaking;
growth
necessitates bruising.

Blossoms fall not
Showers of soft confetti, flurries of petals
remain eternally per (fumed) + (fect)
"Except a seed fall"
What purpose to fruit?
Nourish our souls &
let the body hunger.

Her veins of moonlight opened
Spattering the stars with milky ichor
The righteous do not taste of death
Only oblivion, the space between constellations
and consciousness.

The maker unmakes,
Who spun her from enforced purity
and cast chastity like chains about the moon
Those who exiled celestial bodies into orbit
Would condemn her for the distance.

She had known love,
And lovers, before the horsemen
Before the jealous hunters
Bound all that was feral & female;
Denied her fullness & left her crescent.

It is her death we mourn,
The moon phased out.
An image of light that was,
Casting only the shadow of conqueror,
Her pale visage trampled underfoot.

Discovery
I want you to find my scars and bruises;
Each day sifts through me like a kaleidoscope
And my patterns are now unrecognizable--
My heart is a secret I do not wish to keep.
I find myself feeling expansive,
and this is dangerous for you,
because of the wideness of intimacy unnoticed.

Vigil
Nightshade trails beneath my fingers,
mingles with starshine upon the water,
in the umbered slick of bogs.
Urgent thoughts pressing against my skull:
writhing moths seeking your illumination.
I am called, by your longing or mine;
Why must I always give it voice?
You invoke within me
desperate cries in the wakeful silence.
The late hour laughs at our passion,
My helplessness, hapless irony
And beckons me forth to fill your absence
With vigils in swamps.

Elegy
The little deaths which comprise our lives at both ends of disappointment
Unmarked graves number or excuse compromise and discontent

I had no warning in a heart with hope warring, as though I would dissent
Youth has the years and luxury of folly later to repent

The scent of flesh hangs between us lightning seared pungent
My heathen tears drip blindly heedless of your intent

And so the minutes fall like arrows without you, and neither relent
I am forsaken in this sunken garden as statuary struggles silent

The release of what had me caught leaves me falsely despondent
Even thus abandoned I would not revoke consent

Cassandra in the Carnage
I think I saw Troy burning
behind that last ridge.
I've fallen asleep
at the wheel of a wooden horse.
Fate, a simple mechanism,
Arriving without my revelation.

Relating
When we in nights unslept,
crawled through the wreckage of dreams,
and found and left each other--
to a private pain,
a communal dissatisfaction,
and obliterating darkness.

For Topher
Split limbs emanate from rhythms over rhythms,
Waves under currents catching
Lyricism through melody melding into liquid air,
Hanging like a break about the joints,
Albatross around a sinuous neck, snap and
flung partnered like a limping bird spasmodic
in grace.

Hook at Eton
What drove him from the schoolyard to the mast?
Did he dream as all boys, of irrepressible instinct,
Wild & bloody cut-loose on the lawless sea?
Was he a Huck adrift,
evading the adult world he came to embody?

Had once his feet been fleet & light
of spirit, laughter in song?
His voice channels a child echoing rote;
In reproachful tones he chastises form,
The somber bass having outgrown his words.

creation
inspirated shades of sentiment rising humourous
through the body at the beckoning of blood
the muse throws meat to a captive heart
shall it be found shallow, waning in vigour
waxing viscous moon-eyed & blind as death

Unwomanly
You are the darkness of
decay on my side;
The unsightly tail
peeking beneath petticoats,
The backside of branches
I must never show.
As much a part of me
as unacknowledged nights
down the backstair,
And as visceral a need.

Of Circe
I'm not Penelope,
Don't look to me for fidelity.
I would say don't look at all,
but that's not the way of men.
Even in a shield or a rooftop,
they must look, and possess.
But if my husband whored
his way across the archipelago,
I might well bed the same goddess.

Sympathico
He was stone,
and she was tree;
yet he bore
the imprint of leaf
against his side,
and her limbs
were calcified.

With time
All night I hear the river flow & the river is in me,
or at least in my mind,
though I harbour a notion, like a leaf upon the river,
that it would be better if the river flowed through me,
and so the leaf urges the river to descend into my body,
and one day,
it will prevail.

hourstruck
Our butterfly summer has faded to moth-
eaten memory in the worthless dark
before dawn, when merry-
making has turned sour
into self-parody
more poignant than a
flock of priests
red-faced in the gutter
the broken spring of faith
or dismembered dragonflies
cellophane stained glass
and an offering of flame
to the purity that burned us.

Plastic & Tar
I take a pick-axe to the pavement of time
Splintering cracks in fault-lines we laid
where once we lay smooth-skinned
now stretch-marked and scarred with traverse
such is the birth of souls
Prying these pale reflections of light we cast
thinking to see beyond ourselves
my nails bleed on severed stone
holding aloft what once shone
the recollection brighter than the reality.