Where in the islands northwest of devotion
Utters that voice that is sweetly deceitful,
Dark but serene in its haunting erosion
Deep in the mind? All my pieces the ocean
Washes away, who can find them? They people
Thoughts and ideas in the eddies and breakers
Wide of the safety of lanes, in the wake surge.

Green was the isle, and the hair of the maidens
Freely exulted in breezes from seaward.
There in contentment for just one occasion
Spent I a morning; the sands then were weighed in
Human retention; one-nature. The leeward
Wind would remind me. The salt; the enchantment.
Lost is that land; who could seek its revanchment?

Green was supplanted, and greener but darker
Rose the approaching domain of the tidal
Ocean, outside of all time with no marker.
Deep in the being unconscious, no ark or
Lifeboat surmounting a solemn requital.
Death is a sailor unmatched. And a singer
Silent encircles in vapor and lingers.

Somewhere an echo of wanting ascended
Out from the foam of a distant embankment
Born of the fog—the horizon that ended
Roiling beyond all my senses, all flanked in
Luster's mystique which all reason has sank in.
Hissing and spraying, it beckoned me forward,
Out to the vista where sunlight is cornered.

Sing me the song that my wits will recoil from,
Menace of men who, unwilling, must listen.
Rapture cognition; my muscles, embroil them;
Cast off exhaustion, the waters! They glisten!
Only that song will be fit for my mission.
Madness or passion is fueling my rowing,
Swimming if oars will refuse where I'm going.

Millions of chopping collisions a-cresting,
Hacking away at the tendons of reason.
None but a manic bereavement, and testing
Any exception to fancy as treason.
Always unknowing my heart which believes in
What? Will it soon be discovered, why waits these
Visions of countries on waves that my fate sees?

Frozen separately in waking
Convalescence, base obsession,
   A ritual encroaching on
   Subsistence, living gets replaced.
Corpse-like the results in breaking
Troughs, the vacuum of impression
   Imploding in the void and spawned
   Again in waves one fears to face;
Then the wake of slumbrous moments'
Undertow recedes and closens,
   As distant as it's far away,
   As dangerous as yesterday.

Spend an episode in coma,
Living in the world of feeling,
   The world of fearing to exist.
   The bleak disease that grips the core
Menaces the spirit's home, a
Second's depth between revealing
   The fear of shrinking sandbar's mist
   And dead men swimming back to shore.
Wake again with these contending
Shades, and crawl inside the bending
   Demands of rectitude and time.
   A year has passed, or maybe nine.

Crippled once, effects still linger,
Weighing down with sand the conscience
   That knows the necessary tasks
   And doesn't do them, knows the cost
But has others pay. Whose finger
Points in mirrors of remonstrance,
   But hesitates though knows what's asked,
   And buried in the sands is lost.
How the sands outpaced it, crested
The already half-arrested
   And sinking thoughts, how much consumed
   In time, in terror, in its doom?

Conscience shivering? If thawing
Frees the mind in stasis, set then
   A flame to sear the worldly, base
   Intimidation from a brow.
Set a blaze to burn the gnawing 
Frost of soul that lets regret and
   The shame of fear progress, but wastes
   All else inside its frigid now.
Melt away the indecision;
Grow the body from a vision
   Of life and time alike employed,
   Renewed again to be enjoyed.

Rivers on bridges over the Hillsborough,
    Gray above and below gray
  And below that grayer still.
Rivers that over eons of prayer waiting
   Surf upon the stormy swell.

Anger, impatience, traffic is deadlocked on
     Small Memorial Highway.
  Crawling time and memory,
Neither of which will take me to you nearly
   Quick enough to give me strength.

Rivers cascading out of an eye seeing
     Only stalling, allayed love,
   Majesty below the ground–
Water alike is dancing there. Yet waiting.
    Waiting through and to the air.

Out of the gray and into the same gray of
      Time, a torrent or slow leak,
   There is longing on the bank
Should you be wont to stop; you can watch as it
     Washes all the cars away.

Once, upon a depressing afternoon
Spent absorbing myself in tumults wrought
Of sorrows belonging to others
And pleas I am helpless to succor,
I decided to take a walk, though soon
Rumination would dominate my thoughts.

I had known that I wouldn't cease or stem
My despairing, not just for them of course, 
My friend who was told that the next year
He wouldn’t return, wouldn’t teach there
At his school; nor my friend's aunt dying from
Hashimoto's disease, so on, so forth;

But I felt for myself, so impotent,
Barely able to keep myself alive,
And inward I turned my concern, and
Felt shameful and always returned in
Thoughts recoiling upon my shame; they rent
Me apart. I felt alien, aside.

There downstairs the indifferent world in green
Seething life held luxuriating court,
And I with my hat pulled low entered
The summer environment's tender
Air, on edge underneath the graying mien
Of the sky; there I tried my sad disport.

Stepping down to the sidewalk I had felt
So displayed to the windows, and below
The hedges around the near corner 
I stayed for a moment or more for
Refuge both from the sun and those who knelt
Maybe watching, perhaps someone who knows?

As I passed by the pond, the ducks had left;
Nothing there, but in that, the entropy
I knew I was not up to facing;
I then would continue my pacing
Not within just the summer heat but cleft
Both the heats: that and my iniquity.

Tennis courts and the parking lots, alone,
So embarrassed, ventriloquizing all
Indictments against me to every
Particular thing that could levy
Condemnations, be that an empty home,
Animal or the humid breeze's sprawl.

Then I froze in the hazy midday heat
Once I saw that another walked ahead
Of me to the parking lot, turning
Away from my path; but the burning
Fear of eyes, the dimension of deceit.
He could never have seen me, still the dread.


Omnipresent beholder of my life 
Lurking deep in the terror held within
Reflections a passer-by's eyes are
Observing with searing surmise or
Scrutiny, and so ruthlessly the strife
Presses me with my weakness as a sin.

Solipsistic annihilator of 
Human race, it replaced with avatars 
For my paranoia and shame their
Existence; and I feel my blame there
And among the aspects afar, above:
All of life might denounce me, leering hard.

Glowering at myself from inside-out,
Once I came to the lot I made my choice.
Withdrawing towards my apartment,
Withdrawing back into myself, and
I, creating a looking-glass of doubt,
Traveled in the miasma of that voice.

So heavy with its own wetness, the vine
Upon my window sagged, toiling beneath
Its glut; the leaves, their rainwater, the fine
Array of passion: green, clenching its teeth
     Showing how it struggles, living
     Painfully luxuriantly,
     Haughty with the storm's gift given.

It wavered, suffered with so much to drink,
And gleefully it swayed under the weight
As though to hoard it all, never to think
About the other earth watered, the taste
      Of the rain before the evening
      Had erased all else, surpassed it,
      Leaving what I thought was longing.

The Sun was setting. I saw it become
A solitary thing verdant against
The orange sky, the blue night that now shone
Throughout its crystal dew; yearning, I sensed
      It become a lover, leaving
      Life for love and diving under
      To the threshold of that needing.

Its greens grew rich in low twilight; I knew
Its deepest heart belonged now to the rain.
And should the sky become sea, and what grew
On Earth be flooded too, how it would fain
       Cry for joy to then be taken
       Off, be washed away delighted
       And forever unforsaken.

I saw it leaning once daylight was through.
It faded into night, how it retired
Beneath its blanket of moonlighted dew
To wake again and wait for its desired.
       Then I saw my eyes reflected
       In the glass, and trusting lovers
       Will survive for love, I left it.

A truth in every moment leaves its burning trace
As my desire for you; now Time I must accept
Is true. I feel it in the agony that steps
Abreast with loneliness at every single pace.
My hands need yours to fill their palms, my fingers need
Their counterparts to intertwine; I need my legs
Around your waist; I need your lips when silence begs
For anything to fill the space that silence breeds.
               
You soon forgot the quicksand of my alcohol
Addiction, how you used to stand by me my friend,
Despite the pain you still allowed me to depend
On you, and with your care you raised me from my fall.
When I was starving you encouraged me to eat
And nourished me on death's door; your enduring love
Was there each day we shared a breath of praise above
Our suffering, for once enjoying just to be.

Your love of me discounts your grace, for now that we've 
Reversed our roles, you can't remember how you saved
My life. You're scared, because obsessions make you rave
You shy away from me; I live for your reprieve.
Undoing can't be done, you cannot unbecome
The man I love, so never think you don't deserve
The love I long to give one dear to me; reserve
No doubt that all your struggles will be overcome.

Again we'll find our peace together, we can lay
Across each other's lap in turns and listen to
Industrial and walk along an avenue
And read bit on quiet days; I’ll pause and say:
So tell me all about that one, please let me hear...
And for a second we can live within the arts,
so soon the conversation fructifies our hearts,
Becomes the culminating triumph over fear.

In the primal soul of man,
 How can words surpass the burden,
Needing first deciphering
  Before a touch? Reason–both a key
 And a wall. And what inherent
    Deception of context semantics
    Requires to descend to the deepest
  Ineffable soul so seldom reached.

Words can't dance with hammers from
 The obscurest psychic crevice
Cracking boundaries known least
  Of spirit's space. Hear the subtlety
 Music bests our subtle language
   With. Senses exalting within the 
   Ancestral remembrance of something
  Transcendently uncommoditized.

We imagined instruments
 Made by human hands, but truly
They emerge from dimly known
  Dimensions: forms, holy conduits,
 Governed only by acoustic
   Arrays in a wave of creation,
   Inventions discovered to grant us
  A path to that holy realm at will.

Now we have created more.
 More than instruments and more than
Tools. We've built machines, a new
  Immersion site where we may submerge
 And revere reverberations;
   The state of the art these mechanics
   Engenders revealing much more of
  The musical universe that is.

Newer skins to wear for new
 Ultrahuman beatings on the
Drums; new whines inside a throat
  That will remain griefless all the time;
 This uncovered music's breadth and
   True ocean–the river we crossed of
   Entirely ethereal things and
  We found ourselves human more for it.

What a brilliant confluence
 Swallows me! Fantastic music
Singing everywhere, aloud 
  New instruments fuse with nature, sound
 Never extant here in space, but
   Beneath the eternal amazement
   Beatitude listens and opens
  The door to the tabernacle's gift. 

Instruments fantastic, from
 Their imaginary pistons
Perfectly exacting slams
  To samples, wind, echoes looping and
 Drowning me in artifice to
   The point that all sound is composed now
   United: the howls of the beasts to
  The crackling ice, us, it's all a song.

Ancestors, both distant and not even,
If you heard how night's eliminated
Host has disappeared, could you conceive of
The celestial phalanx decimated?
The ineffable experience and
Vista: human being under cosmos–
Then to know that only ignorance and
Blindness are your children's heirlooms, almost;

Never knew those stars, could you envision:
They will not grow up beneath the same sky,
And they won't look up to those same heavens.
Night now hovers dim like midnight cat's-eyes
Up beyond our urban night-light's glowing.
You were children awed by constellations,
How would your eyes then reflect the lowly
Capsule made of lamps which has replaced them?

All you barely ancient navigators,
Your ubiquitous map that was clear is
Now so faded; augurs, fortune-sayers,
All the wisdom sought in yesteryears has
Vanished and were you to throw those yarrow
Stalks, when they would come to rest unanswered
You would find in all your mystic sorrow
Earth transformed, irrevocably transferred.

Oh van Gogh! The world adores your vivid
Night the most–for those whom it's been given
It's the final human one permitted.

That Tuesday evening there came
Down heavy ebon feathered Death.
So heavy; dreamlike, unreal;
We here ridiculously. Life
In silence; what do we do?
Held orphan-eyed outside of time.

Where are we now? It's unknown,
All terra incognita where
We feel alone and unsure.
What language breaks the barrier?
Death strikes us dumb, isn't known
More now, is no more understood.

What words, directions or cries
Make any difference, any sense
Here on the shoreline of grief?
You light-polluted cataracts
Long dead as well up above,
Sparse cosmic veil, what say you then?

All words becoming confused,
All distance menacingly stretched,
Souls isolated in sand,
Cells consummated into glass.
No flesh can speak in the tongue
Which renders right mortality.

“Thank you for being a friend;”
Thank you for having been a friend. 
“You must take care of yourself;”
Take care yourself without me here.
What fear interprets a word,
How frantically the mind goes deaf!

Swan singing under the fog?
Lost soul already calling out,
Voice reaching back from beyond
Gray promontory of despair?
I feared I'd lose you as well;
Ears deaf with tears, insensible.

So very distant I shake,
So impotently wrung by dread
Here far away like Isolde,
Trapped, fearing for my lover's life,
Who wanders lonely in what
Feels like a banishment right now.

The silver clouds on march up high,
Their purely white extents,
So silently their sparkling's
A sight to please my eye;
In fact a dangerous event,
For even such a thing
So captivating in the sky
Can soon become my end
If it distracts me while I drive.