We turn around, another face is shown That differs on the die we cast before. They say it's all the same old shit y'know. I traveled down to where the brownleaf, flown From bough to gutter back to gust to soar, Has turned around, another face is shown. We walk in winds which menacingly blow Cascades of leaves and slam the open door; They say it's all the same old shit y'know. But when the wrath of transience is sown And the crescendo stoops to subtle roar We turn around, another face is shown. The tendency of energy to go Towards creative ways up off the floor, We say it's all the same old shit y'know. I go to work like everyone unknown And in community commune, once more I turn around, another face is shown. They say it's all the same old shit y'know.
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Adelphopoiesis
If Love is that which casts the shroud upon The mindful eye that sees the Cloud in pain; If Love or his the name which focusing On blinds the eye, but then awoke to song The spirit hears the Word of excellence, Then praise be heaped upon this gentle sense. If steadier the loaded pillar's held When two more hands enclasp, fulfilled or healed By how the bountiful creation lives; To see a soul of beauty's face in Love Allows them the Forgetting benefice, So may we sanctify those sentences. This affirmation in that Lordly Word That turns one to a path affording wide Acceptance that envalues every sod, And felt alighting just as He had said, "If Love is held between thee in my name, There I reside as well the holy flame." May we in loving love all things as much, And see the ways the spirits' springs are matched; Call it agape, happiness, or what You may, we feel it when we’re blessed to wait. A beacon though it's not beatitude, May we accept it with due gratitude.
Villanelle for stars
What did it take for the experience Of seeing eye-to-eye the shining Moon? And if it differed so why goes it thence? We know the firmament had once been dense Beyond the eye's conception in its swoon, What did it take for the experience? To see her golden beauty, the immense Madonna in full cosmic plenilune; Say, if it differed so why goes it thence? Was human nature those days just as tense, A grain of sand within the greater dune? What did they take for their experience? Were they preoccupied as I am since I feel my self and worldview so jejune? And if it differed so why went it thence? Did all the stars above give them a sense, Connection or a somehow secret tune? What did it take for the experience, And if it differed so why goes it thence?
Pictures of a Room
In lethargy I turn my head toward The corner of the room, the dry remains, The shriveled carcass of the roach nearby, And sigh for energy that never was. The carpet holds the choking, scattered light; The coffee table buried under ash. And now, the fuel all burned, there's only ash Addressed to time itself; the chair toward The sill sits vacant in the shafts of light. And though some portion of my mind remains Inside my torpid self, what really was Was held within the galaxy nearby. A spirit hovered in the beams nearby, The motes of dust descended to the ash And mixed in grays like lovers' hair. What was It that you told me when you turned toward The door? That only happenstance remains That somehow renders all decisions light. The heaviness of being in a light Malaised, although akin to those nearby, Is that when others move it still remains In yesterday's interrogating ash. Inside itself, the soul contorts toward A feedback loop: not what it is but was. The testament of Earth without one was Cicadas whitening the lower light Of evening. Stirring on the couch toward The open door, the pen has slept nearby Among receipts and splintered stems and ash; Perhaps a greener world there yet remains. The agency of effort still remains The jewel of human life. Among what was The generations now reduced to ash Is all the richness of the purest light; Millennia now past are still nearby, The same bright star as us they turned toward. Remains of oeuvres derelict in light; Ah, that was when the future was nearby: A present not of ash to turn toward.
In you my wanting love finds its encircling
In you my wanting love finds its encircling Desire, and blissfully requests the tether Be ever tighter, you be ever closer. However I must always fail to render Whatever the elusive touch expanding An individual within another. You crave the novelty that keeps another Obscure experience in the encircling, Encroaching days from you, a bore expanding Throughout your life, a modern serfdom's tether. I know the craftsman's poverty will render His dreams a fleeting fantasy; no closer. The intimate monotony is closer To death; the Silents' span from one another Is further far than voices that must render Immeasurable distances encircling Creation's whole. The pauper's life's a tether It orbits with the world around expanding. The passing days that find your doubt expanding Are huddled ever colder, ever closer Together; and domestic life the tether Does not permit your projects. So another Ennui consumes you, on and on, encircling The tight demands of human life we render. My ignorant heart weeps, it cannot render The means that you require; there's no expanding Garage or atelier I have, in which, encircling Our home from inside comes to be much closer Than all the rest of it. The dismal tether Reality insists on is another. Although you fear it will be just another Abstraction to approximately render Those gross machines, I say to grasp the tether; For if you quit you'll be adrift, expanding So far away from what you were, no closer To being happy, lassitude encircling. I pray the tether, clutching now, expanding May render all the distance from you closer With one another in an art encircling.
Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she
Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she; Screaming the wrath of Poseidon's doom was the sea. Drowning was Panic's cacophony in the blasts Down from above and below which shattered the masts. Crying, just crying and fear. All courage destroyed; Thought, in its vacuum, disintegrates in the void Realization has carved out. Only despair, Only despair and anxiety of the snared. Iron and liquid, the sky is hard yet it melts; Torrents from Heaven in syncopation with Hell. Clutching in darkness below the deck while the bolts Flash in the chaos without, all struggle to hold. Crashers rebound on the hull and toss us around, Piercing a hole in our side like running aground. Light spills in almost as fast as water, and sight, Fouler than blindness, itself impresses on night. People unfathomably bereft in the lands All of us left, that will never see of those sands Where we return; it is never now for the forts Cannot espy us, and nonexistent the port. Always awaiting, the ones surviving us poor Souls of the wreck; we were gone the same as before, Then it was final. The sea in silence responds; All that she offers are marching waves from beyond.
Where in the islands northwest of devotion
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?
The rain falls on the pond of Avion
The rain falls on the pond of Avion; The turtles' armor shimmers black like glass; And softly does the egret trace beyond The surface, then at once without a splash It pierces down to plumb the algal cache, To fish for flies, to skewer and to poke Around the sparkling mirror on its pass Where it evaporates in midnight's cloak. And ever little ripples there respond In quietest alarm to breaching mass, Alert to anything that enters on Its small domain. Beside its ebb the grass Is pointing from its soily hilts en masse Amidst the rain, the verdant warmth awoke A misty cloud that shields the low morass Which then evaporates in midnight's cloak. The tree's patina'd leaves the wind absconds With for a moment, then the next it casts Them down upon the fissures of the pond; And on the bank they anchor next the class Of ducks with plumage darkly flashing brass Beneath the scattered moonlight where the croaks Of frogs disperse in every droplet's flash And then evaporate in midnight's cloak. A waking dream that plays out past the ash My cherry grows while on my nighttime smoke; Our gloaming glows together til the last When I evaporate in midnight's cloak.
Hyacinthus and Apollo XV
The god of music heard my fervent prayers, More beautiful than any man he looked; I dared not want him yet like needing air, I still besought him while my body shook. Let all take note that who attempts is glad, For when I asked of him he asked the same. And then he said, ah here's my handsome lad, He held my cheek and sweetly asked my name. I begged him to unlock the secret song. He bade me stand and took me in his arms, And instantly to him did I belong For more than songs and divination charms. Is this the thought upon the godly brow That though eternal thinks of only now?
Hyacinthus and Apollo XIV
Your gleaming limbs beneath the streaming light Entice all beauty lovers with their shape, Yet I alone most wondrous of delights Have known—their tender fingers on my nape; Your precious abdomen and milk-white thighs That wrap around my circuitous embrace; Your feet that bring you when you hear my sighs; Your lips on mine, my arms around your waist; The melting timbre of your singing voice; The intimacy of your whispering; With these alone a lover would rejoice. But more, much more than one could sweetly sing, More cherished than the blind could ever see Is this my lot, that you have chosen me.
A place for my poems 