Poem L

I lie outside.

A breeze ruffles the hangings of my infinite chamber.

Venus rises in the sky.

Venus sets in my flesh.

I live in a world where independent minds

Must cling to things

Or pull things to death

To ward off madness

Or the vanity of virtue.

Yet solitude and closeness to infinite things

Remind me that the soul is an infinite chamber

Where beauty exists unseen like

The stars of between space

Or flowers that bloom in the dark.

I grow tired

And wonder can darkness shine bright

Poem IL

What do I wait for?

The miraculous sign, water ablaze

A voice airing from nothingness

Resonant with prophetic authority

A woman to fall in love with at a glance

An epic composed in the mind

Perfect and subtle, line by line

Can one person know another in an instant?

To see in the shout of contact a soul bared,

Like Tiresias stumbling upon bathing Athena?

So must love at first sight be a kind of prophecy

And like all prophecies, divinely sourced.

Poem XLVIII

A couple walks slowly down the sidewalk, their only attestant an October sky.

A brisk autumn wind riles their coats, fluttering the scarf of the young woman, howling in fury as the man pulls her close.

Their thighs brush softly; she inclines her head upon his shoulder. The pause between footfalls lengthens.

The end of their journey is reached. As the pair of shadows collides, so do their bodies, an oasis of warmth, of contentment, in a bleak, stone-embossed metropolis.

In a city that has forgotten humanity, there is a remembrance.

In a world that has belied loveliness, there is an emergence.

His hand reaches up to lower her hood, a veil pushed from the face of a bride.

The sun, the jealous bitch, hides behind a cloud to conceal her wrath.

Never has a light so bright shone beneath the lids of Venus.

Like a savage seeing for the first time his own reflection in a pool, he reaches forth, to touch a cheek so soft, so lovely, it pierces to his heart faster than any bullet, any blade.

A ripple breaks the reverie of a primitive mind.

A smile bolts the cell to an imprisoned heart.

He leans forward, his lips seeking hers; they meet upon an altar, two lives joined by something as tender and as fragile as a kiss.

Never has steel so strong flowed in the veins of Vulcan.

No comfort found in the womb of Eden could compare to that found in her eyes.

To be lost forever gazing in those depths, seeing all that is perfect, all that is pure.

God found alive in an iris, heaven in her arms.

I

A summer day: she lies upon a patch of green, the sunlight and her hair merged in golden harmony, cradling him in her arms until sleep performs its grand heist.

Love

A darkened room: she sits in a chair with his child at her breast, embodied perfection, the amalgamation of two selves given physical form.

You.

This is beauty.

This is she.

Poem IV

In reviewing my manuscripts, I see that the poem titled "IV" is different from the one I originally posted here. Not sure how that happened, but here's the proper poem "IV". If anyone actually reads this, I'd be curious which one is preferred. Since it's from that first series, this would make it pretty old...probably written in 2006 or so.

Your lips are prismatic in the act of a kiss
When the light of your love is dispersed on my face
The world colors in a spectrum of thought
At once of you and entirely for you
Bent upon the task of rendering an ideal
Manifest in the moment of your lips settling
But transitory, to be savored
Like a view of the sky in the moments
After a storm clears and what light remains
Distills through the hazy air of promise

Sleeper in The Valley

It’s a pink girl’s room, without the pink girl
An empty bed, softly tumbled
Pink comforter turned down in anticipation
Shelf above with pink-skinned dolls
One missing, in pieces on the floor
Subjected to the work of pink-handled scissors

A blood-red light filters through lace curtains
Onto a rocking chair and a basket of wool
Pink crochet half-finished on the seat
Pink lipstick traces adorn a small mirror
The fading hopes of practiced kisses

On the pathetic vanity desk
A note lies written in red ink
Beside a few empty bottles
That once held pink pills
Now somewhere diffused in the
Cooling blood
Of a once pink girl turned blue

When You Know It's Over

When you wake up alone in a hospital bed
The morning after your evening alone
Spent drinking until your balls twisted
Watching the clock . . . unsure where she is.

or

To put it succinctly:
When do you know it’s over?
When you wake up alone
Unsure where she is.

Angelina

I picture us on a long walk to nowhere.
You’re going on, I’m listing after too many drinks,
Pretending to follow your visions and wild talk.
There was time then, empty to fill with errors and dreams
Like the destiny you seemed bound to fulfill, or that night in the cemetery.
We were young then, but now I feel old, and you have simply disappeared.

The world judges first on disappearances.
Yet though our endless summer led nowhere
But back to that house, between two cemeteries
Where we toasted misspent youth with countless drinks,
I seek there every night in my exile’s dreams,
Refuge from the world’s dumb talk.

Ensconced on the back porch, haloed with smoke, we’d talk and talk
About the meaning of it, and how the sympathetic world disappeared
Two thousand years ago with the Greeks and their tragic dreams.
In our present the ideal could be found nowhere
But there, swirling in our diffused words, the night drinking
Our wasted hopes, every star a monument to our symmetry.

Did you ever find religion, Ken? Not your father’s cemetery
Beliefs, buried under hypocrisy, but the vision we talked
About? You would close your eyes and go silent, as if drinking
In the resonant music of some great abyssal Nowhere,
The void from which spring a prophet’s dreams.

It was always your dream
To rise above the concerns that fill the cemetery
Of a waking life. We never knew where to invest, but in talk,
Yet the profits of those facile wagers never disappeared,
At least from my heart. Of what now does your heart drink?

With a bottle between us, I would pace before your crazed eyes, enlivened by drink,
The kitchen or living room boundaries blurred in dream,
Our pasts and futures, condensed into an immemorial present, thus disappeared,
As we eulogized the sad graves of dead poets, and plotted our raid into Limbo’s cemetery.
Those drunken nights unending, dawn pushed into abeyance by talk,
Content with our boozy breath and shabby clothes to seek the better side of nowhere.

And so our talk was heavenbound, that is to say: nowhere.
Our last drink together was never enough, nor the waking dream
Clutched as dawn made disappear our shades between the cemeteries.