but winter’s roaring ranks did swell
embraced with with windy wings angel
us both the dumpling fairy tale

I yearned to leave the pavement streets
and be as she, whose hair danced free
and merry spiting icing sheets

through wisp through cast through swell and fall
i heard the echoed broken carol
sweets and sharp despite the howls

she sang “the snow can’t hurt me now
its chains can’t hold or slow me down
or lose my hold on solid ground

i once felt every pinch of cold
and nestled deep in bundled clothes
to mother all my hardened bones

but girlish youth unearthed so vacant
a hunger formed that pained starvation
lay me at the devils banquet

heated bread and wine of flesh
the taste of blood did fill my breast
but left alone the emptiness

the hall was lit and well adorned
and every course anounced by horns
but deep a christmas child formed

on christmas day she came to me
and left so quickly, silently
i placed her by an old fir tree.

so every christmas season since
when chills from holy realm are sent
and everywhere lurks happiness

i feel no pain, i feel no glee
only petty empty weeks
and frosty flakes in me

‘

In the pregnant open space reserved (before)
for shifting, groaning pilings;
for proud walls, cracked, stained, thin walls slumping humpbacked [who
would call these anything but;
flawed] walls;
for flawed walls washed translucent, buoyed tall by the tired hands of
men who curl weary bodies down to sleep under worn pillows of hope;
for sighing edifices erected by hands and suspended by love and prayer
and hope; for hands from which coarse brown fingers unfold with
seeping tears
skin too thin to hold the blood falling gold on the damp packed earth.
In the pregnant open space worked by man, by his days and weeks and months,
beside the mottled slopes of blackened earth carved out, cried out;
beneath splintered sooted skies:

It is here,
It is in this space,

that protruding stone, translucent, cold as ice
flails, wheezing, upward
out of barren furrows beaten black with blood
that ran from living hands
to seep,
heavy
and
deep,

into this space to rest

patterned by chance
in pallid serpentine rings
whose sylphic strings murmur
hushed and somber
songs to me
of inconsequence.

[written a few months ago.]

when the tides of our aching hearts find pleasure
in lapping sweet at the sandy shores,
the fires of blustering tempests having faded, long ago,
into the sighing curtains of white morning fog
settling slow
against the waking waters of now ancient oceans -

and the thundrous poundings of racing feet
and desperate hearts grow silent,
and our souls awake to the pattering
tapdancings of tiny toes and dappled rosy fingers
dancing light across brows long since burnished
by the burning rays of extinguished blazes –

look, i’ll even borrow his songpretty voice.

to be like him, don’t be like him. and if you want to be like him, well, there’s your first problem.

they try to tell me that language and decade and society make the man the man he is. but if that’s so, how can i understand, perfectly sweetly purely like it’s mine own, what he says and breathes onto the page? there’s essential personness that transcends all that shit. sure, i can’t know that i know. but i know nonetheless.

swing back & forth between exhaustion, inspiration. feel as though i could write all night and furthermore that i should, but then there’s the should of work & moneytime, which i’d give all my money to erase whole and entirely from the face of this rolling sad earth – yet it come back time & again & poke me in the eye, the eyes, les yeux, says hi pay attention to me or else like a two foot tall dictator –

fuck off, you, i say to him, and he laughs and gives me that look as he walks away that says he’s creeped his way into my soul & ill never be rid of him til death do us part.

fuck the little man; i’ll take a pen and open me if i have to from the gills on up & pull him out & leave him giggling on the side of some silent highway in nebraska.

and slowly we fill in those answers. write for those who can hear you. that includes you (me). because, as he the good man says on page 74:

“and i know there’s no need to tell a story and yet i know there’s no need for silence….why else should we live but to discuss (at least) the horror and the terror of all this life —- “

and, i must add, the beauty, though it shine at times very dim

BUT fleur de mal is gorgeous. never read the french before; blowing my mind.
ah, baudelaire…one for whom my fondness will never wane. je t’aime, mon ami.

and on a related note, a few words about sincerity.

sincerity has always struck me as the light, the truth, and the Giant Incessantly Hammering Two-By-Four when it comes to relating with my fellow two-legged brethren. meaning: it’s the only way to be, but the only way to be is sometimes (always, on second thought) the way of masochism. undesired, unwarranted, and unintentional masochism, but masochism nonetheless. its forays into a twisted kind of loving sadomasochism can be entertaining at times, and provide endless hours of self-revelatory ramblings of self&other-deprecation, leading yours truly to the possession of an all-too-occassional envy of the happily dishonest, ignorant or apethetic; but in the end, i have to admit that i’m destined to live every waking hour babbling my Truths, regardless of the fracturing of world-as-i-be-it they cause. what choice do i have? living, as i do, in the grip of Fate and Destiny themselves, the Forms of forms?

silence equals madness. madness equals denotation and following, disintegration. alexandria tumbles to the ground, but in the head. structure and form twining fluid and formless between and then into the other’s arms of iron. no paeons to angles and lines embedded in painted shiftings of butterfly wings, say i, if my eyes are sight and blindness one.

if something so small and weightless as silence can shift the balance of the moon i see tonight through panes of shuttered glass.

1. why am i writing?

2. who am i writing to or for?

3. why am i writing *here*?

4. which voice shall i use this time?

5. why should i use that particular voice?

and a BONUS SIXTH!!! question:

6. how can we write with any confidence whatsoever when there is SO MUCH that we have yet to read?

?????????

and those,
my friend,
are my questions.

or not.

?

it is

INTENT

that makes feasible
otherwisical
nonsense-things.

walls are paintedupon.

red, black.

noticed that i did this myself.
noticed too that it felt good.

#2:

hilarious, the nefarious windings of time.
pare it down
and it snakes like fire
dappled
through channels and fiddled panels
of hot air.