Polyphony

poems by Omar Willey

Polyphony
poems by Omar Willey

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons 171 Second Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, California, 94105 USA

Soprano
Bond Hermitage Amber Prints Spiral Sub Rosa The sun now rising Vibration Recognition (In a Bookstore) The progress of my scars Unpublished Caesura Bow Twilight Muse

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Tenor
Stigmata Changes After youth is Disparate ideologies in the rain Humble origins Snowfall 11 by 14

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A poem for Henry Grimes A Void Moire Aleph Null Compound Work For Hire Utterance What passes is not time Blonde antipode

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Alto
Nine Crows Tintinnabulation Photo Op Eschatology The Subject Was Motrhead Post-ironic non-detachment Trochaic monologue Sarcophagus Elephant talk Broken limbs The reformed hippies children Before the condos are planted As so often you leave Walking Rauschenberg,

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Unseen hunter Scrabbles

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Baritone
Myriad metaphors Silent Night Splendour Ribbon Voice of the Brahma If Intangible Solstice London Midnight moonlight Connection Eve Reminiscence

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for Aaron Greenreich, because twenty years is not too long to forget a promise I made

I hold in hand this book my life: Full of errors, words smudged, crossed out, Pages blank and torn; still, promise shows: Mysteriously incomplete Where you are woven in its yarn; This tale of life uncertain ends I give this tome and quill to you.

Soprano

Bond Two share the bond of separation. Time cloven hearts, no love, no assuage for them; a lone silent empathy. As she, he recalls how in a touch the world would seem again: darkened gloams at riverside, warm with the blush of blood; quiet words exchanged for silent thoughts her beauty was never a question, his youth (so youthless) no obstacle. Parallel they held near each other and shared imaginings of a time eonic in its stasis, their words its sole motion: there, no numerals mar its eternal concomitance, no stolid masques enacted. Serene communications, naked and real shared: "We shall meet at the horizon, where heaven meets the plain, forever." Friendship should be so binding as vows repeat their memories; horizons know terra and rmament ssure, invisible to mortality. They stretch now their arms toward an embrace that is not felt. No sadness, solemn upon their hearts; all is memory. Two share the bond of separation.

Hermitage The cold gray sunshine light that pierces Through the shadow drapes' shimmer lls The air that clings my esh with emptiness; Footfall rain resounds within The vacuum of my silent room. I dream deposed on tinctured shroud, Murmur broken words in fading haze And try to touch your speechless image As it nally dies away; I wake, and staring see the silence. In this still solitude there is nothing. The dust, the stench, the hermitage; I long to leave my desert chamber. Escapeinto the luminous: Your evanescent vision warms With life, this soul infuses ecstasy. I want your touch illume the beauty Sleeps entombed in jade memory; I want to rest within your realm, To feel your nearness, feel your pulse Is that love?awake within the dream. But you are silent and withhold from me Your purifying word and touch; I lose myself within the why Encircles my scarred isolation, In blackness sink in mute reection. Your apparition, still, recurs; Still minutes drown inside my blood. Within the dampened caesura I wish The touch to synchronize our souls; Still, you offer no resolution.
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I cannot leave this dream to die alone; I close my eyes: hesitation; A single shadow conjoin us: I hold my hand to you through darkness; Trembling in your light I whisper.

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Amber some admire the beauty of a bee trapped in amber, coolly sealed in time's preserve poetic metaphor for eternality i think of the beauty of seeing the amber slowly melt away as dew recedes from petals and watching the bee unenthralled, now free y away

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Prints I nd still your spoors about my den, strands of hair, ngerprints in talcum, perfumerie, old traces of blood where we loved, my uid and your uid in pattern of a voluptuous ower, one as I would give to you; all as broken branches from my life's tree where you have trespassed. Love, for love that gnaws vapidly within, I killed a hunter I had become, cold in the light and begging warmth only your body could provide; now I am bitten where frost turns hoary and blue my esh, and, instinct to kill now bound, cast like demon out, I cannot here live nor feed. This wilderness engulfs me. I nd no passion remains; all is ice and dust; I am rendered as a waning man, where all about is nothing. I wonder as my misery turns to the numb of dying and crimson trickles life awayif I had not loved, still could prey on those... But yours are the prints impressed upon my barren environ where I am dying there is no other.

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Spiral Alone staring into the dark above: no moonbeams, stars interrupt the black jejune, cold soul, shadows former love. And like still night, no subtle brilliance crack stark helix shell where frightened curls this idiot spirit, recoiling attack. A cyclone spiral, the vortex pitch swirls about the eye glowers at me, destroys all, preserving alone the I of the whorl, seeing no razing, listens no noise.

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Sub Rosa I hold to you a rainbow blossom, A silent covenant To sanctify our unity. The shadows of our souls are mute In glow of holy light; Alone we bind our solitude.

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The sun now rising does not paint the sky magent and carmine nor its light like rivulets of molten silver erode the darkness passing; your eyes not spangled with dewdrops' autumnal gleam, and I, no poet to fashion and from your truth gure metaphors and prostitutions. These imaginings are squander. I am but a lone human being as you, sensuous, tender with ineffable emotions, are such; this moment between us, between other moments we might liveanother moment we may lose in impresent contemplations of that which we are not. No thought but when the wind bristles the hairs of this extending hand touching your perfume we are now.

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Vibration Your voice reverberates upon my esh, returning to you the palpitation of my heart. These vibrations pass silently away, lost within the damp air that surrounds us and bears to each the other hesitant shiver.

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Recognition (In a Bookstore) It was an accident, I think, the way you brushed against me so gently that I stopped. The slight blush behind your smile and apology. We knew nothing of each other, but had come together for an instant, exchanged electricity; I would tell you in some otherwhere world how the thoughtless touch you gave me awareness of what I am missing my body a little, but all of my breath trembling with excitement and the know. I wished our careless touch would go forever on and into both of us, and merge me into you. All these things felt. Instead, we smiled to turn away with civilized politeness and potential death where there would have been.

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The progress of my scars I watch the progress of my scars. Open wounds ooze and bleed to form upon my rend an armor cold this dries and cracks and tears away revealing, underneath the old, new wounds: each time more shallow, closer to a whole, yet still at root a scar. No way to bind this; there is only healing, memories of hurt that tell me quietly that my travails show consequence where I have grown, what my esh shall not know again without pain and grim reectionperhaps this is the knowledge never hid. One cannot forget the claw that blazons history into soft skin and bone the character of all mortality; it writes all human destiny, as lines within our palmistry (these, too, are markers of our future); as certainly as we are life the hands of time shall notate us, all sigils on its palimpsest, with scrawl and scratch and deep impression that we may always recollect. I shed this scab and keep a scar. One more milestone on the path of myriad, an index not of suffering, but unity
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with all that lives within and out, a cleavingpresent, future, past in continuity; when I lose sight of who and where I am, these insignia recall for me, for life, my earthly thread. ***

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Unpublished Impressions of a passage since covered with memory: the carpet spangled with evening sequin and pearls drawn through with gold into a carcanet; silent, stillness fallen gently so rebukes all dialogue, refuses to be stirred; the looking-glass shows mere abstract shapes and shallow focus of the slightly weeping dawn through shut Venetian blinds, and broken red chaise draped with camisole The tousle of vacant clothes bedside slowly takes your form and gure full of life and recent love still etched upon your breast; straps and bands of worn elastic reach around and gird your morning modesty. So it begins, this twilight rite of sometimes necessities, this parting, of veils and sleeping lovers becomes your dignity while keys and spreads of the mundane are your immediate return. There will be more, most certainly, small joys, but this makes numbers, hands into a pleasant haze while there is still time, is always time.

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Caesura branches rustle panes rattle carpet forms impressions of feet anticipation of you wind a shiver on skin grown cold stiff esh shuddering erratic pulsations benediction of you

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Bow Another day begins, as any other. The dull awakening. Trivialities, maquillage and dishes: daily glamour. I am quiet in the dim banality. I watch, and see. You would nd it mundane; to hear me speak, you would think me mad, unguardedwithout artice, you stand in light, owing iridescent swirls upon perspiring ngers; your blue folds in blue. Head gently bowed (hide the eyes from sidelong glance), your hair a sable veil whose threads protect your beauty. The dawn illuminates me as it reects your delicate esh; your eyelids close, and the light is gone: from me, from you a subtle emanationall the sound is silent, but for your quiet weary meditation. Alone, you dissolve in private rhapsody, and I am dumb to let this moment (as so many) die, untold to you, unknown to me. I search my pitiful mute vocabulary for brilliant wit, some phrase not trite, to call poetry, as if these minute observations were a truthyes, truth: Truth, to hide how my quietude longs for feeling breast to breast our heartbeats' rhythm; truth, to stie my yearning to be held but I am beyond words. This seeking shiver
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of my empty hands will force a paper to record by token and quill this lapse and that will be all: this unspeaking becomes a vacuum, void aspect of a warm alienation, where I dwell; in presence of your beauty, in still reection wonder, waititing still for the fastening of your last button.

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Twilight Muse Sunset sky stained amber silver: Thunderstorms, near the fractured horizon; Then all in a moment is still, serene. He sits gazing the mirror pond: The shuddering trees down cast their leaves, Gild gold its periphery. Silent spread peace like a veil adorned: A supplicant libation in the still; A waiting repose for the pulse. A breath wind gives life this animate world, Trees, glass reection his wandering soul: The breath stirs her sacrament kiss: It alone inspires earth and sky.

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Tenor

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Stigmata
As words unspent are ineffable, mute the white light that refracts red, green, blue upon your eyes is, too, invisible; unseen would die starved of appreciation: I must tell it to you, your beauty. Pensive, you sit; darkness upon your mantle, you turn your eyes away in stillness, to tell me you have lived, with your beauty (I shiver with wonder to think of you then); how the darkness was your protector as it veiled you in its invisible pitch beyond comment and reach of the blank stares, the murmur of dumb voices and the wounds that sunlight inicts as your eyes reect in the void of their gazing. You wished then your beauty die, and cut yourself from yourself, away, as though cursed leprotic; fresh scars now hide deeper scars so irremediable, your compromise: scars to displace thy stigma, concealed. Still they stare. I could not, you say, I cannot be beautiful.

In the silences between our words our thoughts lurk

easily. So much is knowledge we do not knowI thought this once. Thoughts, my thoughts: to show the world that sees only a calm smile and affable visage emotion would chill their marrow. I could have shown you then, before your eyes, the cut seldom heals. Diamonds, crystalline, beautiful as your limpid eyes in the mauve sunrise lightthey show no scratches on their hardened faces then shatter completely. What gem scars easily yet never shatteringsuch beauty reveals always the aws of its cuts, but cannot hide; this Platonic beauty has been glimpsed by same eyes, tongues have whispered it to tell how; but these glances vile, words been obscene, become my stigma, never quite dead. I cannot yet die, or would, perhaps, to kill pain. Light and silence are the curse of those disowned by their reections, still beautiful beneath all veils. Our denial is a bond that draws us together as it chains us to our pasts if we choose to deny. No reparations now for these unnatural, no repeal of scars. I bear to you my hand, its stigma still bleeding touch me.
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Changes I have heard that people change from you, but into what? Some dream of peace and mercy known to none on this here earth, or into whisps that one might fashion into some steam sculpture, taking form of that which traps it? Spririts are without such substance as a bronze that melts and is remade at will by craft, and we are spirits rst, above all else: our esh may change and must, of course, and even its emotion, experience of all the world, reections, intimations, thought yet these are us so much as soil is part of grass and tree, the well a part of thirst, or wings the stuff of wind and sky; it is our one true sacrament, our path through life and gate divine that opens us to others, where the heavens are, but is not us; for we are love, are beauty, are the brilliant light eternalthis cannot change: it only grows as we must grow, ever brighter

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After youth is if i were young i would idolize you: the most beautiful girl in the world; i would wait to see you every day, my queen, if only en passant your graceful glide; i'd sing about the light within your eyes, the life within your breast, and talk about the scope of love and love's desire. if i were still young i would sing to you a myriad of drunken rhapsodies and tell to you above all how gorgeous aurora is upon your azure eyes; and i would take your hand and hold it to divine the pulse of universal force within that moves all things from form to soul; and i would know that this is sufcient; and as we touched, i would dissolve into the meaning of annihilation, gone what was me once, become what i could not be certain; if i were young, if i were but I am not. Yet I shall reach my hand, while knowing we will never touch, to you. I seek the touch itself no longer, now the act of reaching is the vital thing; I know that now the universe does not for any second care about my soul's eradication, what I am or was, the meaning of it all or anything; that you are beautiful above all things is all that matters; and while I retain my voice, my eyes, my hands, my reason, while the light remains a spark upon your eye, no matter that my wisdom contravenes, your beauty shall ll up my life, and give me rhapsodies forevermore to sing, and this remind me of the youth i lost in being much too long without you near.
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Disparate ideologies in the rain because you are a dyke, and i unenlightened breeder male; because your esh is creamy and your blue eyes peer through hard spectacles, and i probably the great-grandson of the slave of your pioneer kindred matters nothing when the rain drives you to shelter next to me, and all i think is how very beautiful the curvature of your lips and the fullness of your form beneath the water speckling your hardened leather jacket. somewhere it dees a dogma to tell: who might think less of you simply for being told that you are lovely, and surely voices prattle in the 'hood for my noticing, but i've heard worser. their words of us are self-pitiful; to escape the shallow loneliness of stiff indifferent whispers, and then, absence of care: human otsam crests on silent soundwaves of the fear of truth and personal touch who cares, who does not. madness to suppose, but the only way out is to tell you that you have come into my life and transgured it without so much as knowing or try; and that this is all that matters.

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Humble origins A broken bone, a strawberry scar are the anchor of philosophy; the buttery form of rst menstrual blood, the pain in the chest begin our quest for humanity; yet we are told to look beyondwhat? These humble origins have beauty: the truth of a sleepless week, the mortality of a an orgasmsuch things are foundation for all art, all creationa body of work to ll ten billion life times How could one see past the physical; a mis(sed) direction: the warmness radiant in your parted lips as you breathe rst life is not a spiritual gift, but rather the gift of taking, if only for awhile, a eshly form between your arms and gently grant a wish not from some abstract soul or insubstantial psyche, but heart and blood that rises ever so slightly in temperature within your embrace and transforms me, and you into something greater

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Snowfall the rst season is not spring but fall; leaves revealing their carotene gold uncloaked, and branches shaking off the dead winter rest. Slow regeneration in a bud, a tap, a bloom, a splint of green promise preceding the golden age. there is something before the nothingness that must decay to bring forth life, as humus needs the moss the cycle begins in death, not a door that closes, but an opening into the future.

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11 by 14 The window opens upon the world and limits nothing now three oors up, in life or death; he looks out at nothing: only wind replies to his vacant gaze, lifting his long hair into a moire before his eyes driving by, she stops. City life is more than the sum of streets paved with rain and the gait of grim pedestrians, more than make-up in the rear-view mirror and cell phone blather, though one forgets such things when there is work and child care and thousand small items on the the honey-do list. Her hands twitch. Eyes are crusted dry. These two will never know that they have met in gaze, nor consider all the possibilities of what would happen if they looked just one more time, and met each the other's eyes.

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A poem for Henry Grimes Darkness is history and we are black who feel the dust and are second (thoughts) ddles, accompany to witnesses. Who might threnody the not-yetdead as us, whisps of obscurityyou might know how the thirty years are a blade; silence cleaves us of ourselves. Monk knew, and Newk (his silence famous unlike others). You were more than your destiny, the bass pedestal on which Cecil stands (murmuring enter, evening) in the Smithsonian pale vestibule, its unit structures of walking unwalked, white unmoved by your arco gliss. They shall die, but all unnoticed. You call; and I shall only with these murmur words dance about your painting (upper Egyptian hieroglyphs of sostenuto with sounds all alone yours against the silence shadowing your life and death. You felt The Call unanswered and (with (exit))

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there was only, after Tauhid, the vacuum, prana of nothingness where once had been your eye gazing black to all, now whitened, opaque as death.

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A Void You would never understand that we are never that which we say we are, and that this is of no consequence, that it is enough. I cannot in bright rhapsody tell you how the sun pales against your silhouette, your eyes in their reection glow with wonder, your charm voluptuous lls with electricitynone of these. If I could will, you would be who you say not who you refuse. This is not given to me. Not to know, not to change, only care. For you, as you are, remain a void, mystery that reveals not. I to you, the same, as all the rest: nothing special. Denial is protection; when there is comfort within the walls, a prison.

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Moire each drop holds a mirror upside down, turvy-topsy bent incidences streak across the glass bent incidences sparkle where reections freeze inverted miniatures of mirror beads eyes glass and rain beyond this moire, broken city itself reecting rows of Ezra Pound petals pass swiftly by and by to others I am one such strange passenger: without so much as root wherever my feet pauseor stop

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Aleph Null As nature, I create a silence, universal; around me, wilderness; inside this ring, the center me, drawn, Lenten, attending mind concentrate (Dust will not remain undisturbed the emptiness of me, a focus. Mute genesis, where, purged of all language masks, I am pure, am whole again; the cipher around me carved of stones Cinders are scars of a dead ame is the bourn of my temptation. Dead thoughts there scream; cacophonous choirs of undead unwanted things All hope is false) hope; the past rules all too crawl at that perimeter and plead entrance; old words, moribund, to strangle thoughts yet unspoke rotting notions, screaming stie the calm silence, voice of the as yet unfelt idea nothing, nothing

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Nothing changes; all are powerless All change is chaos, stasis is order crosses, ruptures my solitude; here, the beginning. No knowing (the vase without owers, without water, the invisible hieroglyph of the spirit) There is only the breath primeval, without motion.

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Compound History is made in glass. Architects imprison these in their makeup. Innocent as black sheep, they consecrate the hours' sacrice, their preserve. Nothing is caught, there nothing lost in reections: the machicolations guard nothing but shadow on the sundial numerals and the silence of a zephyr.

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Work For Hire (for Sheldon Moldoff) A single bristle makes no brush. We could not complain, as we worked in our quietude, each beside the other, doing "a good job." We had no leisure to discuss our artistry, only work; the rest was asides, the chewing of time. The studio was for the studious, not to breed stars. Many more famous than I have passed, and shall pass again; they will wear laurels. Others are lost to time, nameless but for the lines in which we write our anonymity. Renderings of lead and china white will be remains, where pages turn slowly yellow, then decay. Our work was ours, ideas they shall outlast the work and worker who was mere creator, trying only to survive in such times where heroes only could thrive in the images. Living: living was what we knew, and I have lived.

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Utterance Wheels grind, and there are clouds. A brick high school without windows and a wrecking ball dissembled eyes, wrought hands, eyes that do not blink, accord of soft machines and oil hum Turn away In the ring of tired clang, idle clenched hands folded upon laps adorned with sequin and thread, it is hard to focus my resolve upon the bright brown eyes and bra strap peeking through the shoulder, the cling of clothes: another pair of thighs are shape sparks of memory: summer patterns. Wind breathing through the avenues of lost infatution. Could she feel this if I touched her? Would she regain her innocence? And transform me into electricity? Thought

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What passes is not time Ten thousand nights since you caught the light and scattered it with dance. No outstanding day for you, just part of the routinenot so for him: that bit bore deeply in his grain, echoing in the hollow: too many memories unmade of you now, incomplete in history and form. No way to reverse that ow of time, evasive mystery. If he could sit and gently gaze through wisps of winter coffee into your eyes, all would blur senseless in the fog: it would be kind to see your beauty through the haze so much like his mind years past. Mostly it was words he wanted, with you; if he could nd them: some rhapsody of how in trance he held youthis would not do. No poetry, no prose but simple conversation, if they could talkno...he could listen; you would talk. You could tell him things. His rapt attention would be enough to let you know him harmlessly, and if you asked he'd say, "I wish we could be friends

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yet I do not know how to ask in plain words." You would smile softly at his bashful reticence, and mock him gently. "So many years gone by, and still you're only good with words on paper. You could tell him. You would know, if only he could speak. "Do not underestimate the power of memory recurring, given esh and voice," he'd say, if only...if only... So many ifs are lost in silences.

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Blonde antipode The trick is to seem, not to be. Being is for people who can afford the frosty gaze, the sear of jealous tempers, the drool of insincere mouths and the pain in my chest when I wake. There is safety in the mundane, and I am therefore typical, if only to make it all subside into silence, like the silt stirred up by storms outside Sarehole Mill; once past, the water is calm and clear. The weather wanes. All is still. So, typical. But typical of what? Myriad stereotypes to assemble into some kind of me. Pieces of this and that. Reections not complete, just some approximate me, but these are not meeven if I knew who I really am, if I cared about that sort of thing. When the poet wrote about the dancing girls, it was a mask, and not her self, split open. And so my mask. This only seems contradiction if you believe all you see.

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I know you see my veil and guise. You have told me you admire them. Can you see more? Can you peer deep, not looking through me, not into your images of me, or theirs taken from People magazine and television talk show tripe but me, the slightly fearful child who wants to love and be loved now for all of me, the girl without and the dormant goddess within? I shall hide these like an Easter egg, for you to nd and prove me that you think your search is worthwhile. I shall be typical, if you will believe my words. But beautiful, too, brilliant, too, like the moon upon the harvest grain. I will stand out, and I will make my marks, beyond cliches, their patina of stale normality, if you will have me. I will remove with you I say to you such wild things and hope you will believe not what I have said, but what you feel within. The storms begin again. Water soon will turn to mud, soon become opaque; and I shall don my cloak to weather it once more, but know: for those who wait, there is still time.

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Alto

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Nine Crows Nine crows gather in the naked trees; their cabal breathes intimate and dark billows of thin fog, as leaves, fall just between their overseen: the new-laid baseball eld, surrounded with barbed wire fence: this will be the site of lost childhoods and numbers run; a maze of broken concrete, glass and shredded steel, where minds are spent like wet ammunition and dead ends are plainly visible. They preen and nod so knowing each in their sequester: their bills silent, their claws dictation, wings outspread, then all is still.

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Tintinnabulation he wears a cell phone hands free (in the other ear an iPod bud) pretending vapidly to listen to his own bullshit blather and the trite screamings of the dumbass on the other end the bus drives into darkness wizened, crotchety old bastard mumbling to himself how the young lack all respect, and sense of suffering; dying in nostalgia for a time that sucked his dreams down like a toilet sucks urine neon lights barely ickering the oldest corner of marble and cobblestone in the city, sheltered from the elements by the wrought-iron pergola, weathers the din of Marty Robbins muzak, two talentless bands in different bars playing the same Led Zeppelin riff (white boys think this is the blues), and the inanities of college students, eager for their rst drunken screw the driver breaks into Motown songs Grim pedestrians with headphones, cell phones, idiophones creating shields of noise to nullify all reception, and no one nds it odd when people will not shut the fuck up when there is no one, no listening, until silence once more has value there
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Photo Op Another night on the M1, mist from wheels capturing the halogen blue of auto lights, and slowly spraying spring rainbows that decay into the wind. I too lose myself in the haze. Too young to remember, too young to be in awe of the simple gifts, so it is said. What is beauty? What matters? Theses for poets and philosophes to debate in books I will never read. In the reection of the reections I see a gallery of images surround me: pictures to mark the moments of my life where I could smile. Photogenic, always, but not entirely there, not in the pictures somehow, but of them as a hermit crab is of his hermitage. Even this one you remind me: I recall. It was just clarication. I was never there to be famous, nor quite on a lark. I think about the separation. Would they have shared my causes, and my sense the world has gone quite mad? Could they take this loneliness and soften it with love and random kindnesses? Probably not. Likely they would drift from me with jealous words and petty notions of security. Mirror, mirror: who's the fairest, who's the biggest, who's the quickest one to be through with it all. But we were there, together, the naive contestants in the people pageantry, a not-so beauty contest, holding ourselves for all to see.

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My fteen minutes past, pasted then cut out and (mercifully) become a news footnote. Such is the ckleness of taste and chance and circumstance. It's okay. Fame is not my thing. It was only clarication. I didn't expect a title or congratulations, and didn't have them bestowed on me. All I wanted was to sink into my chair and be able to sit upright, not feeling the burden anymore. What I missed was chance. I could have stood with all of us, all smiles, and bared myself to the world as a trio (or quartet, if she'd have us) of friends, brought together by some uke of biology but now inseparable. That, too, has past. You remind me of it all; you hold the paper in your hands and memory. I just smile in echo of that moment, and the rain washes quickly over the glass and it all fades in again: the road is uncertain tonight. Lights icker still through the torrents. This is my exit.

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Eschatology For all who have had their hearts lacerated by the ak of glass shard, esh pierced through by iridescent shards of steel to bleed out vitriol the snap of bone against aluminum and the lifelessness of muscle revealing ghastly mortality, legs where arms should be, and teeth scattered like dice for you, I'll put fourteen letters on the back of my plush new Escalade and call it good.

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The Subject Was Motrhead Somewhere along the lines of my palm my future, supposedly, was scrawled. Oh, so full of wonderful, great, neato stuff: going to be an astronaut, and wave to mom from outer space; going to have a girl awaiting me with piping hot dinners and promises of intimacy; going to be rich and famous for doing something indeterminatesuch are the words of psychics from my youth. No one ever read in my hands the years of sloth and pointless toil it took to get this much closer to the end of my life without so much as a single bit of fortune; no one read in my blooded palms the suicide attempts or cracked bones and plaster from punching the goddamned wall. The only fortune ever smiled upon me was that I grew up impervious to promise and kept a warm heart beneath all my bitten skeptic skin. It's a little lonely in my age to look around and see the smiles of vapid yuppies who used to smoke pot and the Republicans with mohawks, but not at all surprising, no. We always talked of traveling time to make a better present while

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everyone forgot the future. I hold still to my ideals of youth, always tempered by encounters with stupid assholes in my life; I hold this love I've always held for friends who most probably think that I've forgotten them; I still, in spite of all that life presents, believe; I still, from shelter, live and act as though my neighborhood and species are capable of something better than selling out to humanoid-formed demons' dreams of plush conformityonly, you cannot ask me how. Only, I'll tell you that I do not know; I know only that I have no other option, except a very long killing spree that would lose its fun quality after the rst ve years or so, and that would be a bummer, dude, especially the clean-up time. Just don't come up to me and say, "Gee, I remember you from school," when I hated your sorry ass then and now, because you don't know how it felt to see you coast

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on by, oblivious to all, or how I hated every day of waking up to faces, beautiful to me, whose eyes never saw me. That past is dead. I stomped it dead while listening to Motrhead. But here: take this orchid to show that I can turn the other cheek. I look down at my well-lined palms, and think. Silent thoughts. The breath of wind that blows through trees across. The falling of a full moon night.

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Post-ironic non-detachment Too many tongues-in-cheek stuck like they had some reason to be there, but no: just hiding in the bleak belief that snide pop culture quips are some sort of genuine knowledge, when all they show is the vacuum tube not only sucks but supplants an intellect that might be used for something other than garbage repository: maybe some existence in a world where there are leaves and conversations grow. The cold brutality of one unable to feel the pain or joy of others; the cruelty of one who knows so much less than one thinks about the universe; smug and snug in the armor of ignorance, contempuous carapace to keep from feeling human after irony, there is only the emptiness it always hid. The life turned inward like a snake gnawing its own tail, blinded by blood.

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Trochaic monologue Truly, I am saddened by the knowledge Darwinism nowadays is helpless In our evolution, and because our Human dread of death and sympathy for Fellow kind has driven us to many Tries of immortality: medicines, Ergonomics, grain rotation, vital Minerals for natural longevity All the things that stave off tragic dying All preserve, too, worthless lives whose death would Certainly be swift without compassion Stemming from the cool desire to save us, Everyone, when some deserve to reap the Fruits of their own idiocy. Any trailer park can spawn a brood of drooling Morons who will probably run for ofce While they fuck up all they touch in taking Places from the ones who actually might Make another's life worth living and spread Beauty, joy and love instead of beer cans, Jailtime, lameness. Now, this day I call forth: People, wake the hell up! Let these assholes Do away with themselves and stop taking Up the precious air that's better spent on Plants with purpose: let these jack-offs die now. Bring back natural selection's vengeance. Nothing must be done to save the stupid.

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Sarcophagus skeletal beneath the esh where shivers in a (here broken, for)) quiet solitude as mysteries of the Stone: mute, dumb as a veil, no longer (words were once the sigil, where numbers did not) sufcethese now insensate things hidden, there (inclement mortality, yet transcendent) shroud the limits of an ineffableend, where beginnings are foresworn.

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Elephant talk sharing only the trivial (as if recognition of surfaces were somehow depth) and armed with absolute proof that the shallow is profound, since someone on the Internet said so, and who could argue with such mighty, school-trained intellects like thatwe let dialogue become the words of characters in piss-poor lms replace our actual thoughtsthat is, if we ever had any, since Derrida said we didn't, and we paid a hundred thousand bucks of our parent's money to learn such wisdom; we measured knowledge by the amount of bullshit seen in music videos, then went and got tattoos, put scarrications across our esh, coins and shit in our earlobes and mouths (which didn't have anything to say, anywayso why not?) because some funky-looking nigger folks had them, though the tattoo artists were all middle-class crackers like us, only with less opportunity to grow deeper in our grand and easy whiteness; then went and told our parents we needed the keys to the car to continue our rebellion

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Broken limbs Eight ofcers of the alleged peace litter the Chicago square with their rent esh, blood veins with shrapnel islands, and the smell of death and shit; eight arrested with absolutely no connection to anything or anyone in town, except that they work for a living seven death sentences and life imprisonment is the vengeance of blind law (thank god for the old testament enlightenment that demands death for more dead): their names lost. The cute police statue erected moves every ten years because no one can stand to be reminded of the depths of human idiocy and cruelty of so-called organizations this, and more, so that two hundred million pale bourgeois can roast weenies over their George Foreman grills, and drink beer while their demon spawn play croquet in the yard yeah, enjoy your Labor Day weekend blah blah blah motherfucker

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The reformed hippies children Their legs and arms in a constant bounce bounce as though they do not care about gravity His red hair lifted carefree by the quays zephyr; his brother sharing the gaiety his mother unamused and stern walks just ahead of his father who squints behind his spectacles, his face has no memory of smiles a little-sized jacket with The Doors logo: he cannot be more than nine years old as they all climb back into the Volkswagen Eurovan, fashionably red and modern

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Reminiscence The chaise longue holds him rmly in his late afternoon ritual; espresso and glossy. Time told by the wheels of trendy mini vans, whining sounds of soccer kids and fast food. Reecting from the image of the SUV window, the school where his two children toil daily; he often tells them tales of regalia: how he brought a cow to its rooftops, and oated garbage bags with hydrogen down its halls and the all night concerts that staved off the nights of wonder where the next meal came from and what would be left after nuclear winter and mutual assured destruction, how in college kicked a television set down six ights, riddled Reagans efgy with darts and monstrous questions beside (all the while unanswering the questions about the hash brownies, cocaine potatoes, LSD) something kids and everyone should live without the prison of nostalgia without the slavery of sentiment this was the dream; now he returns to a suburban

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Dorian Grey reversal lm now: old images of self beatied obscure the rot of here and now so slipped away like scraps of poetry, worn album coversmarkers of young rebellion buried in coziness, bed bath and beyond None of this was planned in marijuana haze and chats around the Poor Mans James Bond pipe bombs slipped into the neighbors Brand names and leather interiors, principles are now thought with interests in mind, rate and time the measure of life for the children, sure, and wife one must sacrice all sorts what was worth ghting for that he cannot recall the time his parents visited and left him with his childhood Holy Bible and a foul taste, and vow that he would never be like themno one ever becomes exactly like his parents dreams of an insulated world, or of course not like them; everyone should ght such resignations, and

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for just a moment, the old embers in his night-brown eyes icker with approval before the clouds wash away the sun, the light, the glass reex and then returns to reading The Village Voice article about Ani DiFranco and the politics of approval. What does it say for CSI Miami tonight His mug perched on the teak, reection distorted in the drops trickling and ready to evaporate into the thin air of ethic

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Before the condos are planted the croak of the lone tree frog reminds pastoral is dead, subdivided theirs, theirs, theirs and maybe some space we are absorbed; some dream drown in car cacophony and the pneuma of mechanical chisel, metal teeth chew the earth become asphalt, again. he has scurried slowly across the eld to watch his swamp world lled with the vacuity of forms and ideas of progress.

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As so often you leave mundane traps your vision does not see and my wishes are silent therefore you will not know how how a how long ing how timid how warm how much how I no you will not because you see clearly before you the press of your days dull routine and all that you or I would want is so much less than the duties of your imagining

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Walking Rauschenberg, beneath glass and wire rim, pomade glazed goatee and wry (never vapid) self-satisfaction like the ankh that dangles emptily above upon your second-hand Nehru) ares digging Tony Bennett on designer headphones, thinking if (it's called that anymore you are, wow, a rebelde an individual patchwork martyr, self-stylish as if it were (grand creation to imbibe the dross of your dying world and forth spew from your mouth this shit once from assholes of corporations who shit it rst on you, on lost costumanity, turned on sworld like a revolution that will not ush, rape (all in sight, fucked with a poison and you die)) surely you, surely didn't believetoohipgottagono believe what was left (implying, of course, care) No, what makes you (for you are made, by capture tranquilized, resold to you no longer a sel(l))(cell)self, such a mystery

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Unseen hunter Spoors of industry. Blue, then red, then gold, golden brown, these concentric circles begin. Rain. The brilliant colors bleed. Blue into dull puce, anemic red, and gold to pale amber against the black rocks. A small and silent trickling becomes a ux. Open wound. Metal quarry, pierced with points of stone. Prey, unseen hunter.

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Scrabbles Scrabbles at the denim. Three, six, nine, twelve fourteen bones beneath the unwrinkled green sigil, hieroglyph that once marked warriors, now mere ornament, meretricious. Blood ows there, and marrow but the hand, withdrawn, offers not; eyes deep in shadow regret their vigilance, and are still.

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Baritone

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Myriad metaphors Myriad metaphorsall are mute: none describe the light that shimmers reections of the mauve setting sun's light upon the darkness of your eyes, nor the lineament of the air that, heavy with your perfume, cleaves us together as it emanates from your breast and gives me life.

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Silent Night Ten thousand past specters denude themselves beneath a blanket darkness. No fear there to strangle secrets, no untidy retributions from a whisper light. My hand now curled, numb bears a not quite invisible, a wound where once I wiped away my mouth: it no longer murmurs words to cry the twinge of memory. Held to you, by light of Eve, warmth of night. Eye unblinking, see the rivulets of crimson not; where scars unseal themselves as mute mouths now, unpursed lips telling deaf ears tales of soft and liquid history: how, beneath dusts of time, unstirred passions wither and are unmoved, but for your touch: still unto death. This choir of blood now pale within your radiancea plaintive vocalise. A human hand might hear and heal its silent melancholy song, But no ngers reach in counterpoint: I am a cappella. The question fades and dies: unanswered call, its dissonance. Beside me, lie like moonlight; never see this uncertain reach before it dies in down; no, do not turn your sleeping smile to me and gaze upon my visage, fallen; leave to me your backside turned, and unseen face away this moment, lost as mystery.

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Splendour Ten thousand years and thirteen billion bodies rough sketches, before nature perfected the form of beauty cut out of the light and denes you; the fruition of cosmic design. No glass sufcient to reect the magnitude of your heavenly body, and so it blinds them all to the soul within, but you you could take me in your hands like a dewdrop in the morning sunlight, scattering prism reections, and I would change as each ray changes into ether without mass or form; dissolve into your divine radiance.

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Ribbon Time is a bright black ribbon in your hair unwinding the opposite of the clock ngers slow extend to touching at the contact is all stasis: each impulse of electric apprehension alone, before all thought and perception; in this in the moment, and, at the knot where time after time contrives itself to hold no past, no future tense only present, perfect, as myriad strands of sunlight reecting back expose the truth as they are undone by your gentle hand.

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Voice of the Brahma Divine words cannot change the curls of your hair, or color your skin reects (all races mere reections of light; I am no magiciannor will words, small or polysyllable, create sculptures of esh or metal or marble to raise swords in justication. Many people think because they are powerless to do these things they (like them) have no life, no meaning. Do not feel this rationalization. All these can do is try: to reach that which within us is genius, and let a light radiate forth by scratching the patina of banality that hides you from me, yourself. On the wind a breath recalls the vibration: where our ancestors sang the world from our dreaming into the stuff of now, if only for us, awhile; this is the breath of us, of that we form into the future. Fly into the billowing, and punctuate the air with your signature.

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If I want to dream of you and all sensations that clothe you suddenly reveal your naked beauty.

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Intangible White burning metal illuminates the burnish teak where your consolation lies before me: the glow of your image, this picture memory. Your frame absorbs the soft lambence, to my eye returns an apparition: incandescent billows shudder shimmering in each wave modulation the ux of your diffracted symmetry. Suspended moment: this vision, of eyes grown dusky with reection as they avert; your amber tresses glisten with bare shoulders' perspiration; your spine caress against the cedar shutter doorI pause, recall our sympathy. Hourglass sands reverse their cascade, delineate your gure beneath the peignoir silk touched uorescent green. Darkness alone holds time in this moment of the mystery. Did not this wind hover about us and waft between us where the perfume of our bodies mingle surround with the other essence each of us, did not your napeskin tremble then with blush beneath the shadow silentno love would resonate my hollow cavity where syncopates

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your pulse with mine: this is all we know, this moment binds; these uncertain ngers retract perspiring from your heat, delicate. This frame silences the motion, the spirit animate that surrounds your body corporeal, preserves only a moment past; this intangible reection gives life to this lifeless would picture, if it could, no frame, no captured silence before words becalmed to nothingstill it lives. No kiss, no blood pulsates suddenly wordless against our cold lips, no taste upon our tongues the salt of passion quiets my bristling thoughts. I hold alone an image.

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Solstice As any other day, the sun will arise from low behind snow-spangled mountain peaks; dust will dissipate, invisible to the eye; and owers will grip the soil and stone to bare their blossoms before the light. Ten cycles of the sun, three times, have passed before, exactly each as this (we mark them all with candles)why should this day be different from all others? Your life goes on. If you could stand and be aware of heaven, you would see how, high above the spinning earth now bathed in luminescence, time stands still: for a moment, you are the star of all. The sun stops in the sky, stands in your shade, eclipsed, as west wind swirls about your form to caress you with its felt formlessness and move your fabric to gorgeous delight. In your aura, leaves grow green again; molten frost turns to dew; stamens, pistils sweet intercourse with each other; and honeybees dance the silent message: You bring with you Spring's inspiration. As you are reborn, so the season brings renaissance to all thingsthis is your gift, this celebration, your nativity; this day is yours alone to share with all who live, who love, who wait and wish for spring as surely as they shy from winter gray; for you, for all, each year another blessing.
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London Youth that dreams of nothing else dreams to see herself in silver and glass that projects rising stars. The lensa black moon rising. Here I am, caught in glass, cut where I am consigned to Flatland and mere memory: memories yes, these I know. Two decades staring, through shuttered reverie: private resorts, sororities, and blue motelsdim domains all; soft smiles, solicitations, lines and lines of repetition, and dumb inanities; cliche redheads and cute hot tub hookers, with never a glimpse of me. Darlings all, these images. These pale, soulless shadows searching, no longer selvesno, something less: a masquerade. Tinsel, sequin and decolletage are truth where Eros is love, free no more but slave shackled to the bland mint where dreams are pressed dead green. Yet they do not die, but hide beneath the stately ivy carapace that clutches for dear life to that which fuels its fuse. They become one

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and live together where a separation kills. See, my shell: a genius symmetryand know my lone invisibility.

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Midnight moonlight Silken, supine, midnight moonlight cobalt blue uipon the curve of her ilium, she lies beside her lover, eyes averted, searching. Silent as the mountain snow drives through the vale, inward she turns, her visions: (A girl, then (a lady, a woman, and what then? she) knew none of this ; so may questions so may (with stone opacity) youth, a life: these are not known until lost. In this her love's esh, her mortality forgot, now. Now only the question, beside her self, present. She would have no form, pure desire unite and merge their esences (calm her lover upon) her breast: pure love, unquestioned questions. The shadow (of snow upon the wall)turns her lips toward him with whisper: You see of me many images. You kiss gently this form, curl about your ngers these tresses that veil mefor these, for whatever you (have, will) see of me, for all these impressions do not love them, but what lives within: love me, love me for my invisibilityshe sinks, spent, into thought solitude. Her skin shivers beneath the furrows as his ngernails bite softly into her shoulders; beneath the moisture of his breath she feels (the words): You are, love, and all (I desire) only. Not for the line draws your calf to thigh, nor the dilation of your eyes, slight, as I
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touch your handnot for the berry brown of your areolae, or the sharp hard bone of your mouth beneath your kissI no other way, love, than thisI could not I cannot love the absence of the space, the light your body absorbs: Do not fear your beauty; your beauty is you.) Such might he say, she thinks, and perhaps is right. She draws close the curtain, her bosom to his, and shares with him an invisible moment.

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Connection Twelve chimes distant toll. Striking light upon ngers. A ow of electric excitement creates vision. Passes from light to digital motion through chemistry are not words, formulae. Sensations are all, and this is knowledge: indices, intricate movement, eyes, receptive, emotions sightless. A spittle mote more important than a blush or perspiration. All sight unseen. Two have known this, as myriads now, connection: remote as they are twain in the mystery. We were twice ourselves then. We did not know. How this world, its drama written, nightly slipping through our hands, our ngers creating the real from the intangible made this: tangible, invisible feeling become palpable through these palms, these words' place upon your lips, your sweet perspiration, against all possibility. No longer no closer than the line between: no more detached protocol. This is now, and we are real as the esh that touches now, digit to digit, and sends from each to each our identity.

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Eve The cloak night shrouds your Cynthian form, Shining endow with silver radiance The universe cleaved with your velvet.

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