a good lyre

night’s slow recession

another callous predawn

what a strange math

this all is

an explosion once and then

forever

a tidal wave

enfolding upon its own wake

as though it streams

endless into itself

a voice and an echo and the

silence

all at once

the chorus formed

of tired permanence and

its restless opposite

a small tempest

that gathers dust

as chaos passengers

tiny conjurings

that question motion

amid their spirals

and move

as little hurricanes

across the sunless

meaning what, precisely ?

the question hung, fanged and

inescapable, like hunger,

like bored sympathy expressed

in landscapes, as though

asked by mountains

or by the always-changing

patterns of grasslands

why the bother ?

a spiteful undertone at this

mad survival, at this

perpetual season of the hunt,

the futility of art

the bland pointlessness of creation

why the noise ?

asked by unheard voices

save time

who only shrugs

laughing at the sun

a brow-beaten godhead,

a shrinking candle

who gazes on a game

funny that now

i no longer see only you

you’re there, as always

yet, around you,

like a mirror made infinite

within itself, a dance

of time, a sea of breaths

shared inside the same

little symmetries and

tiny furies

strange to watch

the spiralings of memory,

like the turn of galaxies,

birthing from inside of you

or a binding cord for so long

i have tangled in,

the awkward mess i am

rekindled by

the sounds of you

a cosmic background noise

a voice, a timbre in the

waves of you, these

little lives

of ours, descent

in synchronicity, the pains

and all the joys, and the laughter,

like a symphony, a movement

that underscores

this age of us, our brief

and never-ending

epoch, a future

which unfolds in shades

unknown to us, some

unlit sunrise,

save for that which winks

and blurs, a vibrant

smear of paint, so far behind us,

our entirety, an image

in a rearview mirror,

with us, as ever, on some highway,

on roads that will forever

one fire bidden and then

enshelled perhaps like

white breath contained in palms

cupped upon a mouth

in some insomniac december

a single flaring something

akin to luciferous evening

the lightning bug, the stormling’s

little tantrums, the sun itself

in its falling, a rain of abandoned

ambition

another gormless metaphor

begat of boredom

in slothful language

a nameless graveyard

of dead civilizations

and quickly dying ones

and nomads who

once followed game

in its hungry travels

an unearned ending, after

an unceremonious beginning

a taste of something

almost worth the trouble

its finish a lingering flavor

vague and unsatisfying

somewhere lost

inside

a chemical release

spheres aflame with strobing

dreamshards

sound and voice

combining currents

merging frequencies

shadow figures dancing

in the cast of lambent memory

a sun birthing and

collapsing

nursed in its first ignition

and tended in its fading flicker

by the light

of another

unmoored, as ever,

adrift amid mad, roaming seasons

at once at peace and enraged

static and ever turning

clamorous as thunder

in its apologies

and silent as snowfall

despite the muse,

the angelic vox, who is,

in the wild, legion

like the padded shoes

and grippy socks

that serve my lumbar region

where once a pen

may have set a scene

some frank and apt

description

now the coal-black face

of a cellphone screen

with its faulty text

prediction

go duck yourself, you a.i. brain,

you half-birthed evolution,

you fetid fates

of fascist states,

failed techno-revolution

had i something else

to write about

i suppose i’d wax poetic,

but age leaves one

with much less hair

and much less empathetic

this rhyming scheme

may seem obscene

and random, doesn’t it ?

back to free verse i will slink

i think, cuz, for real,

it seems as though i cannot

speak,

bathed in callous light which bleeds

from the core of you, cold and

indifferent, you or me, or both,

that angry starving, a tortured echo

from when we fed as one, and now

a quiet, an afterbirth,

something given and

discarded, created and

kept

as an assumption,

like what was owed and never

paid, despite what empties

defined us, the hollow sown

and reaped, fallow ground

giving beneath digging hands,

a desperate search for what

never was, just jaded memory,

just exhausted resentment,

tear marks on filthied palms,

and bloodied fingertips, like yours

which slipped over the rise

of a stomach once,

before my name, my voice,

my eyes which only asked

what are we that were joined

as earth cradles seed

and urges it skyward

nothing now, i suppose,

a soil upturned

revealing no one

a wage of war, the debt

incurred, to carry the banner,

the colors of our glorious tribe,

then blood, gathered like

mass in the holy temple

collected as though fallen

as tears, as bits of paper,

vibrance catching wind, that topples

over a victory parade, that ripples

moved by sound, by speeches

saying those not us must

die, spoken in breaths

filled in car exhaust,

the burning scent

of a dark ichor

peace, an ocean, unknown,

uncrossed, the ever-distant shore,

its sand, like time unconfined,

a sinking warmth

perhaps felt only by the bare feet

solace found

within the motion of eyes,

the gentle upturn of pink-dappled

paleness

blooming into a sage smile

you, submerged, refracted

by night’s unmakings

into suggestion,

blind form, ghost breath, a current

in a quiet room

beside you, a traveler,

carried upon the effluence

can i bum one off you?

-yeah

you buying?

-buying what?

you a cop?

-motherfucker, do i look like a cop?

coke. no one’s buying.

-maybe because there’s a police station a block from here.

really?

-really.

fuck. thanks for the warning.

-yep.

one for later?

-finish the pack.

bless you.

-yep.

he held out his hand. i opened a palm, half paying attention, eager to leave. into it he placed a rock of cocaine about the size of a shooter marble. i chucked it in a sidewalk trash can a few blocks later, figuring free coke is as trustworthy as a politician holding a child’s penny bank in a room without cameras.

the open mic was lively, although the singers outnumbered the poets by a large margin. the highlight was a young woman doing a more than passable Lauryn Hill singing The Fugee’s version of Killing Me Softly.

some nights in the urban wilds, it seemed like dawn would never come. then there would pink and red and the unreality of purple reflected on skyscraper glass.

-something insightful

-something beautiful

-something acerbic and yet innocent

-soft but calloused in the ways age

begins to close around you like a shell

or a cage

-something that condemns and forgives

-truth in safe proportion, unthreatening

to the self-delusions needed to sleep

without guilt or nightmare

-something revealing of regret

but marked by hope

-something regarding love or hate or

maybe indifference if the mood is right

-some personal history expressed

in allusion and allegorical myth

-something that moves like touch,

like breath, like skin upon skin,

mouth upon mouth

-some sex, if only to secure attention

-something faithless but willing

to consider

-something brave

-something fearless

-although i am afraid

one hand opens

unclenches from around

ruined stems, like a falling

a topple of petals

a wilting of what was sown

the once sacred geometries

of unfurling

color, given form by wavelengths

watched by eyes beholden to light

unmade by dark, like us, a loss,

a regret, a word spoken,

painted in anger

shade of scorn, in time, fleeting,

callous pride, a seed descending

from its host, resentful of the soil

in which it lies

the other hand reaches, claws

at the throat, where rests a scream

or a sob, refusing to burst,

and only chokes

and only suffocates

and only speaks as an undervoice,

defiant, unformed, unbirthed,

growing into something maybe worse

bordered by the mutating

self-image in a dirtied mirror

not unlike the kelly and sage

found within a reflecting pool

gone putrid

poisoned amid the grease-fingered

grip of contract bids

helpless to build its simulacrum

beneath the vampiric gaze cast

by blood-fat oligarchs

gorged upon the hemorrhaging

middle-class

its death throes the crackle

of discount fireworks

the sickening peel

of adhesive backing

sloughing from red or blue

bumper stickers

and unskippable ads hocking

gambling apps and money lenders

looms the eyes of our mocking mask

the empty wealth

of our tedious kingdom

temple of grinning suicide

dotted by bleeding-edged

digital mouths

built to think for those who cannot think

envenoming former farmland

and sucking dry the aquifers

the ancient waters yielding

to fruitless progress

as mountains once yielded

to their flow

now sold in quiet buyouts

a cannibal conglomeration

earth and the body entire

repackaged

re-advertised

the snake, still starving

it was somewhere

off of north monroe

beside the little gallery

some indifferent, nonsense name

evoking color or medium

where an outsider, on a stint

for possession with intent,

had painted his father again and again

an expressionless muse

in watercolors

in a cafe, laden with perfumes,

earthen darks and heavy cream,

the smoke-sweet of chilean red

a calming cling of herb on winter clothes,

where Either/Or was playing,

that sad and silken voice,

a grave accompaniment

for the college crowd, while we said

our piece in our brief hours,

a love, a death, an ache of isolation,

a congregation of verses

declared in many rhythms

and varying cadence

a song, sung by all

to no one

an occasional door chime sounded

revealing outside, where our words

were lost

in the penitent sigh of evening traffic

and footsteps, hastened by cold,

upon the sidewalk, blind

to our desperate meaninglessness,

another night in slow descent,

could you be emptied

freed of the inertia

which took you?

the sun and the moon

who made us, and cradled

us between them, celestial bodies,

you of little griefs, of unsown

promise, of petty self-sacrifice

on an altar you built for yourselves

while you stared into our faces,

accusing, as though we held the tools,

as though we had demanded

this blood of yours which runs

through us, some stolen sacrament

an unknown prayer spoken

in the sounds of marshland insects

god, were you blind, you children?

are you numbed to the cries

of your own?

are you immune to the pull of us,

who never knew

your fathers?

and watched you weep

or stare in callous stillness

when your mothers died?

we, unknown to permanence

unbound to home

a tether giving way

an escape velocity urged

by your indifference

we who loved, maybe once,

when our eyes were young

and unmarred by your erosion,

when the quiet that fell

in the melancholy dusk

was one of content surrender,

not a space inhabited by nothing,

the deafening unspoken,

not the hollow we have carved

with bladed silence,

not an us, unmade, unspooled,

a scatter of dust

flaring in light,

as though we lived,

and vanished into the darkened corners

of a vacant room

the starving roots of a dying tree