Cult of Absence

I.

A placid state with little movement in the streets; an abysmal quiet suspended from the ear.

To beat the setting sun, to catch maybe a glimpse of fire oozing through those icy sapphire husks.

Fast now over brick-work; legs are loose, distended cords and the body is all physics.

Portends the evening with it's sky peeled back like the rind of a spoiled citrus.

Clouds run long against the rot.

II.

Within dreams, a derangement of sense - a cascade of image and feeling like the textural seething of insects- a kaleidoscope of the transpersonal, each living painting etched by fire into an inner night.

A hunger strike invites the hollow; folds of flesh transform the pattern.

III.

To seethe inside a dream of silk. A cobwebbed dearth of insect light. Of silent mirth.

IV.

In the ocular night, all is sound.  

The seething of light becomes texture and weight upon the base sugars of an apple core. 

Where the ants are not marching triumphant, but seething in time.

My tongue teases reason off a sea cloud,

for it sits where it cares to,

and infiltrates the mind's city with a spectral embrace.

The salty character of damaged songs

that always speak without speaking

and prescribe time as a feature of a chariot race.

I want less movement

flowing backward from the words I make;

I want the sea, if not the salt,

a fretless tide that is never damaged

– unlike the words I make.

Beneath This Frozen Ground

I tease the night together with a soft light
lapping my face like a wound...

A bitter star labors by the bottom
of a silent cloud (or a magic cape)
that disfigures the darkness
of the deep freeze that ponders back
through inky pools of time

Is anger beneath this frozen ground
beneath our fire, believing nothing,
beneath our dreams deft, muted presence,
cognating light as a silver flower
or a virgin birth?

I dreamed a morphing every-shape
until it caved
and the night assembled my world as a finite place
that suspends our shared beliefs

To Suffer With Oneself

...and to lose that ancient fight – the willingness to suffer with oneself – is to hold death within the lungs and yet continue to breathe. But even this is a romance honed while we are awake and knowing nothing else; when pain burrows deep within the mind, it renders time obsolete, and like real death, denudes the very fabric of experience, as if to challenge Heraclitus with a deep and lasting darkness...

...we know not the mind; we call it home, anchored by our senses to incalculable strands of movement, sound – the likes of which dissolve into a stream of meaningful locutions, patterns, judgements. We call this home. We call this “I” this self, this we, this royal We; this pronoun engenders careful scrutiny of what we see and hear and come to believe to be outside our home...

...and to lose that ancient outside, from which each derives the willingness to suffer with oneself...