White salt out there,
your whitewashed twigs scowling,
set into motions unfamiliar
The night is growing thick
Like a matchstick,
the finger is aflame
It has sworn to shimmer
The teeth abandon the jaw
and float into the sea
A jawbone into the sea's eternity
A poet stood before the ocean
and never returned
Return he did not
and in my cupped eyelid,
a quarter of the moon, the man's weakening
steps, a half-knee dipped in water green
Arms swinging like ropes,
their jolly, an unfathomable absurdity
A poet walked into the sea
and never returned
Every day the sea washes
his stench from shells and crab skins
Every day the sea washes the sand's antenna feet
A poet walked into the sea
and never returned
Evening
Evening,
a marble plateau,
sliced breath of the day
Red pomegranate seeds splutter,
turning the mouth’s estranged sky
into a velvet sienna
Stillness—
Lack of movement?
Lack of thought?
An elongation of emotion
A requiem for the living
The air
it seems
is suffused with a flat, ochre light,
static around the bark of all trees
A consolation,
A lullaby,
A long, long pause
Everything in the goddamn world
bending down
to stare at its very own miracle
Twilight’s veil flutters,
an insect strapped to the day’s chest
She moves
Slowly
Carefully
There are no mistakes made here
The day falls in precise moments,
just as it began
A cold shudder
A celestial beast
salivates over life’s porous face
and the horizon grins
Evening,
the sly tongue of light
Artery
I.
The peninsula of the feverish hand, the upturned hand, dwelling like a conundrum above stripes of skinned air. Throbbing needlessly, desperately, throbbing in blue and lavender dots, a circus, a forest, an entire landscape of paleness. Winter's old confidante, grey and ancient, flowing steadily, rapidly, ravaging all in its path, coursing through the giant tributaries of veins, their sputtering valleys, their saline consonance.
What is it that has been spoken? What have you learned that you cannot forget? What is this disease that you have caught from the warm belly of the night that you cannot let go of? What is this desire that you conceal in your grand stutter? Why must you run in ambiguities, make of this fragile clockwork a carnival? What is it that holds your tongue and makes your limbs, your tiny feet run wild in me, day and night, night and night? What is this, what is this ugliness that you have sworn to be?
II.
In madness reigns the eccentric song of the heart. The dreadful rose heart, almost terrified, almost smitten with its own severe palpitation. Its unquenchable need to be, its admirable desire to not. Suffering in its own arms, it gathers, it steals all the songs of the world from all the curious corners, the brightened edges, the bizarre waterfalls, the ever-wading roundness of things, a pervading haze. It is its own demise, rotting behind the schizophrenic eye of the mind, quivering behind thistles and needles. It is own demise and its own solitary reed, fluttering through the atmosphere, the blind sky, the all-pervading grey lake; hiding, then flinging itself in desperation, into a bush of orange feathers, the armpits of unknown birds, into raven eyes and abhorrent beauty; burning in innocence, the unendurable truth in its vascular scream.
III.
Spring forth, arms, from the remains of the day. Spread, seed by seed, knuckle by knuckle, eat the dust that glares from the edge. The wide-eyed sphere of air that watches with an unmistakable gaze, a hollow stare, the only one, the carcass of a large God, the aftermath of all truth and untruth. Spring forth, arms; arms of restless ache, restless lisp, incurable restlessness, seek in the white fade of emptiness the echo of your being, your calamitous birth, your undying being.