Battered by Words of Sad Gold

Often, as I awake in my room
I am the first person holding a candle
To myself, the one that murmurs
In his dreams, weeping

These are the days, I wake up to
Empty fountains, ringing bells
For a world that falters
Nearly as much as I do

My lips taste timid metals
My mouth raw with hunger
To enter the capital of the opposite of indifference
I am sick with solitude

My eyes are lost to the nights
I end up staying home, too late alone
I see another solemn evening pass
There goes my life, it weighs upon me

I am the first and last person, I talk to
Each day, the mouth that cries
No water from these eyes at noon
When the world expects my strength

Summer sheds her petals in soft agonies
It’s only in Spring, I stare and stand before
The large white house, and ponder
The clarity of extinguished things

Like memory, like the angels of the soul
Beneath the slow martyrdom of strain
I spread my heart thin in massive words
Letters, poems, that don’t amount to much.

That I Hold You Forever

I have too much ingratitude for children
Too much dysfunction for marriage
It’s time to pour into my flute all
That I have left, the sum of shepherd-thoughts

Simplicity, of this life of neglect
According to its own rhythms
With the sustained voice of its own
Infinite exchange, dancing sums

I only have blank joys, to decorate my heart
Outlined ideals I would share with my friends
Imaginary beauty, lovely years left lonely
My suns will quickly run their course

Have their due, their little sport
Of wishing, and complete tender rounds
Of giving and secret fidelities
I own to much narcissism for family

With too much of a conscience for defeat
Toward all life embracing it from afar
The turbulent troubles between my inner shores
Are my last excuses saved for the future

A future where everyone is going to die
It suffices me to deepen, to endure
With vaster concerns than I am now capable
I am ashamed, since your departure

At the premature immaturity of my supplications
The light-fingered censure of my woe
To you, in whom I don’t confide, know this –
I have tasted the thirst that magnifies us.

Wasn’t the Road Filled With Eternal Welcome?

Telling you all would take too long
About the wholes and misfortunes
These breakthroughs through errors
A memory more persistent than love

But I’m okay, perhaps our lives
Are no more than the fire’s reflection
Complicated by Plato, flabbergasted by Nietzsche
I must sing the years full of
Sweet abandoned voices

Places I have been, what I have seen
Vulnerable in the public squares
Telling you all would be seriously wrong
We have our special secrets, our wanton surprises
The double anguish, wounds that

Won’t probably ever go away
Prisoners, genuine humble pilgrims
I want no descendents, I want
No shadows in their blood
No more serotonin misfits

Tell you all would mean mourning freedom
And I don’t mind being alone
For in solitude I’m always in ecstasy
Always writing poems to nobody.

The Breakup

And with a sudden emphasis
Of our sad geometry
Like an old flower in a tender vase
You threw me out the window!
Circumscribing our enormous debts

A lover’s never so beautiful
As when they look at you with cold eyes
As if for the last time
Kissing you on the cheek
Knowing that this will be the last time

But I must replay the excess that stops me with its dream
Love is fickle as the sea
Though it is my rite to everything
The one in me who’s lazy & distracted
And requires art & romance
To feel complete, or entertained?

Trapped by the impatience for another
As if experience could mount immortality
Into my forgotten heart
But like a pinned butterfly
Motionless and fragile
I may only beat my wings

Your child seemed surprised
I cried for him, the last look
And I have been debased
Lost to the vast circle of beautiful things

And with a sudden emphasis
The purest sigh, there was not affection

Here, waiting for me, at the other end of the room
In your eyes, only ruthlessness
Proof of a goodbye so grand
Your promises of friendship were like
The curtains you said you would tailor for me

Thing one says, when trying to be polite
To someone, you can’t be the other half of the world – for.

Being Used

I have bartered myself
With violent abandon
Suffered myself against
Pitiful impulsivity
I have given myself

To the wounded and the aloof
Only to be abused like crushed dahlias
I have held myself like a shinning ghost
For marigold-garlanded projects
Attempted healing, at my own expense

I have martyred myself
In the arms of uncaring lovers
And I am dismembered & bruised
I have sought connection
Like a fragment without a purpose

Stockpiling fruits of attraction
For something outside myself
I have been illuminated by gargoyles
Tortured by single mothers
All to be somebody’s rebound, somebody’s scapegoat
Until the wind of their lust changed direction.

Paddling With Breathlessness on Stilts I Write

Until now, I knew I possessed nothing
Damned by decrees of my own
Selfishness, I pretended

Behind a circus show of reason
At the Ball of tantalized feeling
But now, I know the way the world ends

Whatever else I might succumb to
It will be the poetry of freedom
Without rhetoric, or tricks of lying

Or slang speech particular to my times
Until now, I hid in incredible musical scales
Behind melodies, beneath the chorus

All poets pick themselves out of rivers
I’m half-deceived, by the lovers who left me
Because I was nothing but a poet

But it’s my first white wave of climbing hope
The last word I say before my doom
Whatever else, poetry is my first freedom

So don’t ridicule me for loving a kind of art
My dream is an impatient cadence pure
That gives me resurrection, when life

Offers me none, these flaming parenthesis
Have become my means of transcending you.

Chaste by Revolt

It’s a serene irony, isn’t it dear?
How impotent we are in our moments
Across the bitter ease, of our lack of ambition
And the sevenfold love, of our lost dignity?

Languidly we plod on, like beings of evolution
A landscape of fresh Dawns, in cruel lands
It’s a surreal comedy, isn’t it friend?
Under a vast ceiling of silence

We suffice and part, equipped with desire
Enacting will, smited by the wilderness
The heart-mangled scorn of the past
Has nothing of note left on us

We are free at last, with the rich
Faun flash of new lines, new destinies
Beauty can flourish even in anguish
Life can feel vivid, even when sleeping alone

Feverish with independence, I beat away attachment
It’s a serene irony, insulted by promises
How I’ve grown old, even
At the risk of falling into eternity.

A Last World of Spring

It’s too late to cancel them now
Isn’t it? The birds of spring, sing
Like a mindful entry into the passage
Into summer, May will be coming soon

Reflected in the water of the buds
Fields of division among the twigs
It’s too late to wait up for it now

Isn’t it? The broad gestures of metamorphosis
There are no taboos in Spring
It walks into us from the inside

Sobering with sensuality, green effort
Hazards of the course of threshing floors
Of desire and clarity of impulse

It’s too late to cancel it now
Isn’t it? No more fence-sitting for us
Ambushed by the teeth of flowers

Like a perverse playroom before summer light
I can dwell here a while, to taste
The nearest stars in your liquid eyes.

So Long Foreshadowed Days Have Come Around

We grew a hundred years in age
In a few months of love’s highs and lows
We died in our gentleness
And came alive in the silver cracks
Of our passionate connection

Thunderous tidings from your lips
Where I went sobbing home, imploring God
To make you grow fond of me, to utmost chilling
I fell by my Muse’s gaiety and zest
With too much useless art for your pragmatic tastes

I live to mourn and love in verse
Since you came and left, I having nothing now
But a more wicket heart that bears regret
In frozen winds and the itch of spring
Summer’s pageantry will hopefully hasten to admit

That I’m still alive , though I have been dead
I aged in months of crying sleep and tragic songs
Half up the slope of too much feeling
Where lovers do not come, and I must sit alone
As if in the dusty lashes of a lingering solitude.

To Death Are We All Bestirred

All souls of those I loved
Remain translated inside of me
Like a body of literature compact
A bright array of time’s swinging singularities

So many harps hung upon the balconies
All these guitars twanging for
Cheer divine, our star like courses
Comprehend the racing years

In wordless ascension towards our
Own kinds of bliss, mortal hearings
We are garlands of quatrains
Stanzas of the unyielding Almighty’s word

How we endure like spoken flutes
Of alien thresholds, invisible feelings
I am not sure, all spirits of those I treasured
Remain like jewelled ornaments

On the lips of children not my own
They will not take the earth by force
But by the bodies of their subtlety.

A Drop of Blood Like Shadows

My shadows have remained
Behind there, like a midnight guest
That doesn’t know when to leave
But the truth of the matter

Will surface, in sleep
The frosted sacrifices for art
Will suffice, the choice to be free
How the house is altogether preoccupied

Dust to dust, something called love
In the world, perhaps it’s not for me
Into a sterner living I must surrender
Why? Because life’s calculation found me wanting

There is no mercy in these stark designs
Of fate, no morning ray that sweet
Uncouth are the women who left me
Just as with my mouth I used to travel

Down their spines, their hips, their hands
Like a quiet shawl of tremulous abandon
I must warm myself with paler dreams
The dread of separation still in my gut

Heavy as a lost gleam of a lake of swans
There is nothing to forgive, nakedness is ruthless
My shadows have remained
I only sow the reaping done, a late comer

To reality, and ecstasy and maturity
I arrive at incredible vexation
A rage to break the barriers of sheltered patterns
Afloat in me like ice in foaming wine.

Spring, in Memory as Old as Love

Today is April’s chill
The terrain of minutes without music
I walk another flowery permutation
This too is Spring
The annual green of shivering birth

These hours are inbetweens
All of them, without remorse
How marvellous is the change
Becoming is better than being
Or being is a myth like self

The next day, it will be longer
Stretching me with saliva and for the stars
Within a week I’ll be somebody else
Hopefully, out of the rut I’ve hid in
Spritely with the air and the moisture

Of potential, laid eyes upon possibility
The glow of inspection
On droplets of something new
Entrancing me perpendicular
Towards moments perceived differently

O’, I will study the buds this time
The orchids I will take as mine!
These Seasons my last Encyclopaedia of glory.

Building Up Summer Afternoon

Summer idle, I can feel it now
The enormous backdrop of expensive
Experience, the shrill stillness
Between suntanned now
And spectacular discovery

I want summer afternoons
That schools me outside
Searching for an anonymous evening
The jazz festival of bruised hearts
Summer idle and tempestuous

With roses of women past their youthful years
Erupting into cheeks and friendly kisses
With strangers, I shall never see again
And sweat that pours from an urgent sun
The views with red jumping borders

And skin, indulgent Augusts and Julies
All those mixed emotions
How the heat can make you weak
Where it counts.

Eros in Retreat

I am waiting for my white butterflies
Summer’s babble of small noises
Where I can feel insignificant again
Behind crickets and proofs of God

I’m hoping that timely intervals
Will save me from this grief
Amidst the healing weeks
Of mourning and mornings

I have the patience of heart-breaks
That fly with delicate wings
Of youth’s love-sheath so tender
Bemused by nature’s glory

I am waiting for my sampled flowers
That have no flaw, but their unchanging beauty
That diamonds are only accomplished
After eternities, epochs long enough

That they forget what they once were
I am waiting for my single aims
To be accomplished in-between
The death of memories, it shall be sweet

To no longer recall who I have been
Or why art mattered, why love was cruel
And how the seasons fell, little squire anti-climaxes.

I Laid my Boyhood’s Head On The Pillow made for One

With careful fragments I’ve built
A shredded identity, pillaged by hope
Ransacked by heart-break

I’ve customized my grief
To the rapture of my outlaw-state
In glowing morning I feared

Being left, and prophesized abandonment
In which my very atoms
In the cosmic mirror, were scattered

I couldn’t help martyrhood
Like the shell of my grandmother in me
How we give our power away

And how those authorities contrive
To judge our worth, in quick months
Of evolutionary design, bitter comments

That I remember to this day
About the kind of man I am
With careful foolishness I betrayed

The self, that wanted to join in marriages the most
A wild execution of the simplicity
That marked me from my childhood

Of having been raised in poverty
Boycotted from those simple joys
I am a frenzied bargain of dreaming cheeks
Without the spice of wonderful confidence.

Maybe I Loved You in Another Time

To the one offering the most
I’ll throw you with fervor
The intimacy channel
As if I were twenty again!
I’ll whisper to you my blond text

Barricade myself in poetry for you
Like a seasoned artist
In love with love, making beauty
For beauty’s sake, this
Petty song of my same-old revolution

I’ll call you the last revelation
Of my creation, mounting syllables
To suit your needs, to tailor your curves
In the alphabet of your most intimate voice
Like a blade of knowledge, I’ll cut you

Yes, like a young soldier dying
From neglect and love-wounds
I’ll tell you how I’m the lone survivor
Of too much will to love
I know it’s not really a news-flash

Simply, the price of delicate boredom
Strung out in a treasure vault
Of living in words, secluded form experience
To the one offering the most
I’ll give you this, melodies predicted

For the same reasons that makes your body
A womb I cannot intoxicate myself in
A period of mining your feminine sun
I have not the Venus laments left
To trick you into defiance of your self-defenses

So instead, I’ll wait for snow to cry
In April’s unrelenting gloom.