MADMENS CALLING: pOetRy

…where have I been wandering?
At morning matters had their purposed gait,
but by each pause in the afternoon,
I dropped my question
and sly specters like ground shadows
picked up the scent of curious journey,
offering broken shells as passage fare.

…what must I do with dust?
At morning I asked the sky,
yet by afternoon only listened to dirt’s reply.
I forgot my question in the glint
on a second’s pang and, as though bade,
set off once more knowing little,
enforced by vapors alone.

When evening came to summarize,
then I felt from time to time the sure blank
that signified another day hushed forth
in charged anonymity, stranger to itself—
within which I had given away everything
to prove nothing could be taken—
within which nothing was learned
because I had consorted with lesser gods.

At the blue sun which hovers
on the sea-line, the women
are preparing.

They take entire eras.
There is no rush to fold away
the humming marble of these rituals.

In a withered staccato
with beige pearls and talons,
with brows hacked by art
in unspoken chapels,

the women fling wings of linen out their windows,
their statues mirrored by ages,

as they lean into a crepuscule of ghost’s sweat,
every aroma of the street crossed by who comes home.

again I shut my tongue at the letters
that passed between us—

there is no way to speak of it,
and you go off into what I have done

the rapid waves I know under your wheels
I cannot explicate as we speak—
out of place, I shut my tongue
almost writing on my skin that which I will not say

as you,
as a reminder of what I never heard or read,
that you might know if not blind or deaf as I
could be again, if hopeless—

if not, you know,
I hope

once warned of sleeping beside peonies, I withdrew them
at a phase between obedience and curiosity.

what siege might these blossoms
with their ragged arms lay upon my dreams,
tearing their cover in extensions too subtle for the naked eye?

what could this torn flesh of paper leaves seep
into a volume of skin, what could they mean?
would their proximity sneak into my slumber at its lowest guard?

just fragrance—the buds do not shy for long, yet
now the peonies have been left in the room night after night.

years have slackened through the dates of their weaving,
obedience and curiosity blend into an unfinished inquest;

this life has sent me back to the rule of riddled peonies,
and I know no calm as I watch them assimilate with other shadows:

silhouettes in a dark bolt that obscures answers,
rendered by passing.

I.
they incant:
maroon bulls spell
names of blood
cruel chords vocalize
barefoot voids
beneath black fans

they incant and:
her veins writhe in a small revolution
her sighs throw knives
her longing a gushing wound

: he will kill you every time
-I don’t care, I’ve changed my mind
: don’t you want to live?
-I’d rather be free than alive

II.
When I was very young
like the wind claims
a wanderer, she claimed me

Dressed in spider-woven
shawls and musky-red
infused jewelry, fixed

the stones of dusk to my wrist
taught me the slow dance
until I thought it mine

Neither woman nor friend
but a vengeful salt
of mythic abandon
the only strands holding
this and the world
are alone with fright

and though the cut of caravans
still arms on clear-slit dawns,
I’ve grown infamous for dancing away

I remember
clothing, a burnt down jacket that got too hot inside—
I kept my hands in pockets all the while
scrambling spurious notes or a track number,
clandestinely

clambering ideas over what I was doing there,
expecting each turn a confrontation, a meeting
plotted by my own invention’s fortune—

Stravinsky’s cliffs and jagged vagaries inviting me to feel considered
by fate’s nature, coaxing me to remember seasons before
I acquiesced so willfully to desperate notions,
daring me to extract my diseased involvement
with them—

notions,
in some way even a spectator to this, my own anxiety
of no worth, perspiring, though
I would not remove the jacket—
to do so would’ve seemed like losing time to hustle
through an encounter fate forced not to work

—I left, crazed as I’d came,
that ice blue weather burned in me
for later thoughts of a painting’s true worth astride the Rite of Spring

1.
every send-home is a thorough navigation:
this is where I burned, I was burning
had to wrench from the template

in a flat once on a wall,
homage to Pasolini it said
…because something else still burns my heart:
a whole cycle for truism.

I packed the phrase, however—
everything was up inside to begin:
I immolated that person who always
starts futilely—

too often had I cleaved meaning yet
I maintain no belief in that idea of knife:

as a dog must keep barking at noise,
this heart must find what to do with stillness


2.
On occasion, I fear the sensation that nothing will continue.
On occasion, it follows that there is fear of this self and of this world.

Perhaps the fear comes from times I’ve lost life for having the thoughts I think.
One reason is that various conversations in my head have slaughtered language.

Part of trust in gods is because that which cannot be understood is kept from reach.
Gods will put within reach enough to make humans want to understand everything.

In an instant, it is possible to submit to all: we are made.
For instance, we want to understand everything: we become makers.

a first encounter with shifting dimensions
was when I heard certain songs—a house
transformed by experience into this cathedral

many, I recollect—enough times
endured a majesty in the surpassed
until no longer architecture nor flesh:

I sought rooms of green velvet
drunk on lilies,
I sought green lilies

drunk on glass,
I carved my thoughts to perceive
unswallowed panes

until I could see legends
beneath an interrupted bead,
a sanctus of space:

the grotto that,
in being enclosed,
unfurls heaven

I don’t want to write these ideas
after I am gone, for after I am gone
I pray you remember them already.

I need to say today I had a sight from the other side:

in the pages of trees loosing scents indifferently
and illumined before a sunless canvas,
I saw a distant tower-top ornate with a place
I had taken my boat across a wide river
to reach, this place where such temples
were said to grow like moss—

here I am, where I am,
even though it
breathes at me
from across
a street—

I know the place
as it breathed in me

and it is wherever
I was throughout
the day
and nothing
let me forget.

No need anymore
to make the blood run
my dear, I know now

each thing I opened to my wounds
has seeped in quietly
as perfume.

In dreams that do not require sleep,
some of us will start,
like a flower in the morning;
like flowers in the winter,
some of us will expire.

The bloom in my veins though,
cannot die, for I once traveled a sea
that takes each lie into its fold,
mother to every errant child.