How rude!
The Bones of the World
churn, with vaster Rhythms
and sentences longer than our own.

Drape
those worldless forms with poorest leavery
and the Mind will sup happily
of a meal it would fain have foraged.

Possessed by Glacial time, however –
History’s sediment is turned, blank desertion.

Remember, then,
when next you would dine in Nature’s great hall of mirrors;
look beneath, grapple with the Bones,
and confound yourself not with the world you eat.

Standing waters breed reptiles of the mind —
resisting the powerful pull of ambivalence,
the inert impulse,
what do we find…?
Tinted saran-wrap filters stay my hand(s)
from moving beyond the lens.

The Gear Chain!
Drive turns around again as desire,
towards agitation,
tumbledrying,
dashing the gentle quotidian raft
against the taller spires of our limestone ambitions.

I have heard
that the daring young man on the flying trapeze
has mastered that pull with deft intelligence
and found his murmuring Derwent
in happy orbit.

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.

Every Monument a Marble Janus

poems from 2017-2019

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

This collection might variously be considered a journal of the strangest years of my mind that I can recall, an attempt to establish a personal imaginative mythos, or the fulfillment of an obligation to a younger self. I hope that in my attempts to write myself, I might also affirm a general principle: that it is always worthwhile to wrestle with your own mind, to ask questions of your world, and to thread your own golden lining through whatever circumstances you might inherit.

“Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”

“Does that mean,” I said in some bewilderment, “that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”

“Of course,” he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.”


Glossary:

Blue: hope, fantasy, desire. The intoxicating pull of our projections on the future.  The opposing force of green.

Purple: ontology of time, particularity, history. Every moment has a particular shade, one cross-section of the infinite braid of all-purple.

Pink: The color of after-death, particularly the more fantastic aspects of its experience.

Yellow: prescription, code, habit – in constant conversation with the opposing forces of blue and green, translating the relationship between desire and its limits into livable thought.

Green: totality; the mutuality of poles, dialectic synthesis. The cyclical ambivalence of the natural world, even the entire universe. The opposing force of blue.

Red: Doubt, criticism, especially when directed at the self. At its best, it is the constructive cynicism underpinning all knowledge. At its worst, red-eared shame: agonizing paralysis through self-doubt.