NEEDLES

We wedded the ink with the skin.

The priest performed acupuncture

consecrated by heroin,

and the nurses purled the sutures

while the knitters prepared the syringe.

These rites we practiced unpinned time.

We survived your blessings and sins

and withstood your charities and crimes.

We know our bricks wither within

but our ivies, they cling, they climb.

WHAT ABOUT THE AGE OF LOVERS?

The age of heroes is broken.

The palace is now aflame.

The historians’ is growing.

The heroes are not to blame,

for, though their strength is diminished

it isn’t demolished yet.

Tomorrow’s the resurrection

but today is just a rest.

Our bodies and experience

form the borders of our mind.

But there exists That Beyond Sense

that we cannot understand.

We get confused in worlds not right.

If bandit’s in the library

and pundit’s at the prize fight

we can’t tell plains from prairies.

We imagine a symmetry

that we can’t yet define.

We assign all our mysteries

to God, to magic, to time.

We gird our egos in armor

to weaken our defenses,

but freedom embraces karma,

aggression joins resistance.

Desire develops into deed.

Our matches become beacons.

We were waves that became a sea

and rowboats that grew riggings.

Orators are clothed in words

and scholars stand on language.

But heroes must speak through their work

and lovers through their anguish.

A DEVOLUTION OF THE VAN GOGH SOUL

My heart sits tarnished

in its rib prison.

The inclement earth

burns under heavens

ashen and barren.

Who erased the stars?

“MUSHROOMING”

If you were forest

i could purport

this noble purpose

for these frequent

meticulous surveys

that I perform

throughout your moist

and fetid shadows

WITHOUT YOU BETH

                       MY LIFE

Beth:

I miss you often.

These paths unmapped and all my everythings nones.

(near me still your spirit hovers

but — unattached!)

standards weighed by a crooked butcher’s variable pound.

*

Breaths used to lift dolphin-like

from our depths

like frost balloons toward the sun

in/and/out, those beaths of lovers

with joys unmatched.

up/and/down/and/up/

an ocean-rhythmed merry-go-round.

*

Death.

Abyss-dropped coffin.

Everyone wept. Someone mumbled a little Donne.

Then they handed round the shovels.

(An egg unhatched:

without you Beth my life’s another burial ground.)

*

Faith?

My fists clasp-softened, fingernails ripped —

faith, you say?

A black-habit nun who whispers yes but means never.

Faith’s record scratched:

Here’s how the faith radio with no aerial sounds :

…