BECAUSE OF LANGUAGE

In the tumbling of the divine musician
And the trample of the orators
There was a mystic poetry

The suave cosmic diamond-egg
Of song and meaning, language
That runs like the brightest streams

Down centuries where we have listening
In the overgrown forest of stanzas
And the battlefield of non-silence

There holds our attention, a voice
Mobs of wisdom heralded, a weak voice
Nearly mute, the voice of the soul

On a torn page of Aristotle’s metaphysics
Where genius had no visible shadow
And philosophy has no material counterpart.

Mapping That Which Brought Forth Honey

It’s breathwork to play with syntax
Like underwater synastry of phrasing
The cadence is a cukoo of metre

I refuse consensus of syllable-count
I’m articulate without parameters
A free-verse bird’s call, a terrible fret

Of the higher forms of expression
A particular stanza, the way the wind blows
Agreeable in a certain slant of light

It’s breathtaking to shape music
And juggle fiction like ethereal plot
The trees, they have a last-chance

Threshold of dispossessing the wind
The poet, purifies language
In ceremony that ponders our hulking innocence

Those parts in us which are still raw
To the core of world-class lyrical topography.