On Impossibility

It is no longer
the dead heat of summer
and the dog days are waning
with every closing hour.

passion seems
a dream abandoned,
and slips like a perfect whisper
through the fingers of another year.

I have become
convinced of the centrality
of the shore —
the constant passing of every wave,

a tectonic coming and going,
the infinite and infinitesimal
in every grain of sand
within and without the water.

The heart burns most
when its purpose is clouded purple with royal
distances & imperious poisons.

These convulsions send my compass teetering,
and rock forth a wave like a child in a tub —

the tallest wave, itself a disruption of
the unconscious world,
breaking and scattering
the land it serves and creates.

Bisected at the birth of the waking ego,
blue and green rush forth to
meet each other at the temporary boundary
of their everlasting keeps;

the yellow remainder is left
to us as cloth and towel

to place atop our impossible desires
and to furnish them a palatable existence.


The resplendent moon hangs low
above the seaboard city,
a yellow reminder for the precipice people,
constantly wanting & crossing.