It wouldn’t do
to take my eyes off of you,
to pretend for one second that
you weren’t always on my mind.
I think about you all the time.
I could not act as if
your lips, strayed from our kiss,
left me unbereft of emptiness.
You are hardly forgotten,
nor will you be unmissed.
It would be a lie,
an affront to try,
a ruse, miscarried, and so belie
that in your absence I am not fine,
that I am not happy but resigned.
I could not affect
hiding a heart unchecked,
strength in the shade of your neglect.
Your going has weight to it and heft.
it is tissue and breathing flesh.
I am removed of the rest
of you, gone but for darkness.
It has dimension, place and depth.
Your lack is all remaining of you,
a presence only in my head.
When she laughs and I hear her,
walking in front of her or behind,
no matter our distance, I am near her;
every thought replaced in my mind.
The water of it, jumping, pouring,
amid her lips, flowing, soaring
from her neck, her head thrown back,
igniting all the air she breathes,
in thrilling fingerprints she leaves
on me with what her laughter says.
And what her laughter says is that,
“I am nowhere else but with you now.”
Then, this having been announced,
the space around her levitates;
it becomes a little weightless,
those who surround her, elevating,
endowing on the air the traces
of lightning that the water chases,
the flash of flame that dances
in splashes on the water’s faces
down the dips and rippling places,
liquid moves the surface embraces,
makes electric that air with luster;
her voice is joy and life recovered.
Her voice is notes of sunlit motes
like fireflies that closely float
nearby, in late summer, and never rest
the parts of them that softly glow.
When she talks, it’s like her laughter
is gathered up in bales together,
in melodies, and gently tethered,
bound in bands of softened leather
as brocaded locks of golden heather.
Her words redound the gales of air
then from her laughter’s music,
all at oncelyrics are there.
So, her laughter has its overture,
its denouement, and a quiet end,
when her slowly fading singing,
maintains yet still some faint ringing,
even as outside a silence tries,
to eclipse her choir inside from sight,
its memory made friable by daylight.
Her laughter is more gorgeous still
than any words I could ever write.
Suspended over landscaped greens and streets,
on pillars raised and columns all arrayed,
above the roads, rivers and gazing plains
are held aloft the wires, pathways and veins.
Through towns and over lakes, you can see them
strung in a web and woven into lace
a few feet higher than our sightline.
They innervate the tissue of the earth
and pass along them amber sparks that race
crepitating along braided fiber
twlangling the wires I mentioned priorr
attired in flesh, sealed and safe, crystal plaits
withstand the siege of nature buffeting them
and would surely cast them far off their course.
//
All the world they break
into a million pixels
light to be refracted
trade to be conveyed.
//
In single file, and yet as one, they dance
along the currents of the capillaries,
the strands of light and passage,
fluorescent beams always clashing above,
stranger to their goal and course.
They disassemble our desires,
manhandle our wants and our intentions.
Unseen they must have been,
and in all details attended,
with care once reassembled.
Sparks rearrange these feelings into parts
and pack them by section within parcels,
writing upon each one in careful hand
the address of final destination.
//
To us they bring back visions, symphonies,
literature, all civilization.
Though most of all they bring us others.
They carry to our trembling hands letters,
messages we long dreaded receiving.
They dive in flight under the half-done light.
We see and hear our love complete that light,
almost embracing those whom we hold dear,
milling stone to dust, burning glass from sand,
the strands author it upon cresting wave,
igniting peals of tears that fell for years
by heartbreak, injury, into vapor.
//
By wonder carried, borne on westward wind,
their silent embers slowly lose their heat.
They rest before they quiet, task complete,
surrendering to merely be, and gleam.
The programs should be on decent paper.
Do not spend much on printing, still,
get something eggshell, ivory or beige.
Something not so stark as white, more champagne.
It should be a single sheet divided,
precisely folded on the longer side.
The page’s contents aren’t of much substance:
my birth, the date and place and when I died,
with no embossed or gilded lettering,
just very dark, flat gray for mourning.
Don’t go crazy with songs, poems, speeches;
pleaselove of godno acoustic guitars.
Let’s keep this thing short; a tight twenty five.
I’ll not take up your precious sunday rest,
I’m not sure any one will even come.
If they are still alive, my parents will.
My brother and his family would be.
I’m not sure why I am always
imagining my brother with a son.
My cousins’ families move on along.
My other living aunts and uncles.
It’s possible I married;
maybe she will come.
After a threadbare biographical précis,
anyone who wants to can say their piece,
provided it’s actually reasonably succinct.
Tell them they should say whatever they want
but all must tell the whole of the truth.
Then, whomever is leading this thing,
church pastor, volunteer or priest:
please thank everyone for coming
and wish each of them well
on each of their paths.
In the event I am to be interred,
along the coffin, following beside me,
don’t bother with a march of pallbearers.
Avoid reading or speaking at my grave.
All should come later, on their own and say
those ideas they want me to hear that day.
Right now, aloud, with everyone around,
Just let them dump me in the ground,
splash cold dirt and grime across me,
in a lonely tract of land somewhere
over hills of silty earth.
You don’t need a reception.
One location is enough.
Either don’t have one at all,
or have it at the church
where the funeral was.
Or, if the plan is I be cremated,
you can get an urn. But I’ll be
incinerated by a riot of heat and fire,
coming to rest in cinder and ash.
If you want the charcoal that remains
as arid scoria, use the cardboard box
included with the funeral home’s
base pricing package.
I’d get rid of me, if I were you.
On a weekday, squeeze in as an errand
finding a place with picturesque potential,
a cliff where the wind will carry me away
if you but let my sinter catch the air.
You’re allowed an impromptu roadtrip
taken to the closest national park,
hurrying to dump me, because you found out
spreading ashes needs a permit in congaree.
Wipe my residue off your clothes as you leave.
Now it’s over. It took longer than I wanted,
but compared to other ceremonies
it was a paragon of brevity…
…everyone just go, climb in your cars
and drive them to your own remaining time.
Perhaps it is that I ascend to heaven,
rising until the clouds over Galilee
obscure my rapture, above, away and free.
Then to be seen by god, his angels ready,
garrisoned along the brilliant ramparts.
All stay still, as they do in dreams.
Some outer gate, closer to me, parts.
Awash over vast, icy wilderness,
beneath a chapel painted in the dawn
towering crystal castles splay
the clouds, the air and beyond.
A city of us among seraphim;
perhaps they are what we become.
And they are what we have been.
Brazen chains heave the portcullis,
the jangling, endless iron ringlets,
directionless religati and inset-linked.
A ladder that ought not be descending.
I never thought it would rise for me.
I am not sure how I’ve attained it;
I certainly did not pursue it.
God’s envoys breathlessly encircle me.
Eyes reach my soul and unmistakably
dye with blue notes the overtones
of what was a salutary crescendo.
Lyrics abound, timbre infinite, echo,
resounding and reverberating,
awash in pealing sound unabating.
They are impatient at all the life
it’s taken me to finally reach
these angels’ wailing, haunting scream.
They have been watching. They have waited.
They sing in otherworldly ecstasy,
Until all my hearing is thus occupied.
My sight impaled by blinding light,
so I have no more use for my eyes.
There is no body, just me. I am fixed
from forever until never, I am this.
Past the gate, transparently,
strafing amid these cirrus streaks,
traversing skylight mirrors wending green
in the glowing turquoise atmosphere,
up overlapping webs of beams,
clambering skyward in eager grace,
ensouled hands all find their place.
Each follows his leader up the rungs,
rising to the stars the spirit hung,
lifted by glittering rush of air
unto the sun, or toward a being
more so dazzlingly brilliant than he.
Mornings have always been
my favorite part of the day.
Now, in 2022, I exulted in them.
finally I was, in timely order,
righting my life again,
developing the many skills
I imagined I would need for it.
I’d always affixed my target north;
my course was now fatidic.
Two calamitous years ago,
back when I was happy,
in late fall, through midwinter,
I would awaken, rising every morning
at five AM in dark desolation,
when it was cold enough outside
my breath would mist itself,
wrapped by air in silver shells.
Eating breakfast piecemeal
medications, vitamins and supplements
all while smoking cigarettes,
surrounded by morning all around.
I smoked in the adjacent day
watching windows, one by one,
fill with yellow light their empty gray
until my car was heated up,
the ice cleared off the glass.
I always hated scraping that myself.
My life had always been aimed at this place
I was thrilled to be alive,
killed to find the right.
and had now arrived.
I was even starting to look forward to it.
I was about to work out.
I had been moving faster,
preparing to strain myself,
clambering the stairmaster
not minding pain, not self-defeating
Finally I claimed a step of control
over my life, my body and my eating.
I can hear whispers in the mortar
binding bricks to one another
in the walls I sealed together,
laboring with careful trowel
to split them from me forever.
The clamor of the killing forces:
intermingling their eerie voices,
actuating smoke or pale vibration;
they remind me I am forsaken.
Though broken by their aural throng,
sometimes I miss them when they’re gone
for they have been, they alone,
acquianted with me all along.
The first career I ever wanted,
what I affixed my target on:
I’d be an angelic, divine agent,
anointed, assured godly favor,
bringing war to tenebrous anger,
that would twist a blue aurora
into a wan light crepuscular.
I’d make it stop, and then wend
it toward the day, back again.
I looked for God and did not find it,
no holy nor unholy ghost,
no spirits caulking apertures,
no angels in the architecture.1
I paced along each of the hallways
winding all ways through my home,
knocking softly on the walls.
Rapt, I begged for quiet echos,
signs this wall was but a mask
and the face it hid was hollow,
search the place once more tomorrow.
An empty space might indicate
some room for magic or design
besides that practiced by mankind.
To focus while I made the raps,
I closed my eyes and parsed the taps,
devoted, beholden to my task,
but did not sleep lest I should miss
the sound of something calling back.
In time, I learned I was alone.
I prayed to the silence of the stone
but always nothing answered ‘no.’
For years I tried and tried again.
Those walls’ respoonse was flat and thin.
I heard no sound nor any talk,
just drywall over cinderblock.
Writing in the darkness of my apartment,
my writing takes that dark to heart.
As the sun sets, and it's hard to see
my work clearly in the murk complete.
Writing done in the gloom and darkness
becomes itself as dark as my apartment.
Finished and dead before it’s started.
Falling short by halfit’s quarter-hearted.
On receipts at hand I write
desiderata in narrow lines…
I will write on anything,
on any nearby scrap of paper.
or sundry liability waivers,
crap from school for good behavior,
menus left behind by waiters,
squares of shiny wrapping paper
for the gifts I will do later.
Whatever it is; where I find it,
use anything on hand to write with.
Recording the drama and tedia
in mixed media.
Listen in and be led
by the storms inside my head.
Fill the page with what they said
until there are no tempests left
or I’m out of lead.