Water

Cold, ragged light shines
on cluster of purple bees.
Over the construction line,
bullet holes in the leaves.

Tide of vermillion leaves
stains with irreversible shine,
has no business with bees.
Makes apparent horizon line.

Enough imperial pipeline.
Tents collapse under leaves,
collecting pools of moon's shine,
sea of anesthesia for bees.

Partake of me, wild bees.
Deposit beneath the pipeline
fodder for sun-powdered leaves,
stick it where cameras don't shine.

Friend A Will Be My Accompanist

Leaves are seized by wind,
mark of autumn’s denouement.
Wonder if my words will reach

when they only seem to float away,
hoping their intricate weight translates.
Daffodils emerge in the margins.

Your signature runs with the rain,
trailing ink like a black-sea firework.
I am so close to speaking again.

Cataracts stick to sheet music,
curtain falls — thick, stagnant chord.
Symphony of grim telegnostic

pleads: never end.
In the empty space, words corral
into place like cold black keys,

flooding the breach — 
fingers pluck stems
reaching down into graves.

This is what flies
from my piano,
so many fugitive shades.

bell

sound you make so immaculate

your intimate trembling terror i love

light caught in my crosshairs sneezing

out of control clutching concern

abandoning aesthetic retention

only the outlines exhale palettes

of pleasure snowing october

potpourri of iridescent sound

You Some Kind of Holographic

Refracting spectral shivers, fraying
not at the edges, with no protective

sleeve handy except memory, light
bounces gently off of knee, scatters

into giddy-up destinies, reflecting
what's best. Colossal odds never

collided with propriety. Statistics bodied
by linguistics. Peering over edge

of sleep, seeing ocean-swept rays
steer the ship transporting volatile

fate, never guaranteed or even likely.
Adrift for days wondering how cells

were compelled to meet at the rendezvous,
establishing you. This sort of rarified

grace topples insufficient recollection,
your limited-edition visage defies

collection, make no mistake my intentions,
though scattered and unsure, reconvene

to craft this hieroglyphical mirror
cracked with the colors of my eyes,

so you might see how dazzling, elegantly
distorted, how disarmingly radiant

your vessel, a-flutter with sky-glitter,
your smile a window through rainbow.

Indifference

Indifferent
forces
never
abandon
you—
yeh,
they
never
even
start.

My Horses

I can only assume the horses died well,
considering the smoke coming from the stable,
and the smell of charred leather. Branches point
toward the distance, where the graveyard grass
recedes. Early-song dew dampens my hair
while voices laugh deep inside the mine.

The horses were never mine.
I drink, keeping down sediments from the well
for my iron deficiency. I spit out hair
that winds up in my mouth, feigning stable
trajectory and lying in the grass
once the sun has set behind the mountain’s point.

A sign with chipped paint points
up ahead, where a great stone blocks the mine.
Red deltas course slowly through the grass,
spilling downhill and filling up the well.
A rose-ring on a finger-stem— ashes, ashes in the stable.
My devastation kept prisoner by hair.

I dreamt I was drowning in a stream of hair.
The torched straw was melted down to a point,
and in that chamber I found that stable
was just a garment, a spectacle of mine,
an infantile thought raised so well.
I dreamt I was swimming in a sea of red grass.

Slit your tongue with a blade of grass,
stem the bleeding with a mop of horse-hair.
I hoped we might ride together, but knew well
that one of us would be sidestepping the final point—
nothing ever leaves or enters the mine.
Desire burned up with the stable.

I see no reason to build another stable
for things that ought to be free, tearing up grass,
galloping, galloping far from whatever’s mine.
Like a fatal sunset, I saw your hair
go up in smoke, extinguishing the point
with darkness, rupturing the well.

Thoughts sprout like grass beneath hair,
never straight, stable or quick to the point.
I mine the air for hints that I am well.

The Once and Future Dayspring

V.

The way it is— we are too weak to save anything.

The way it's been all this time,
despite visions lodged in honeycomb memory...

The way it's gone,
we spent so much time in our headship
we quit charting the constellations
and grew used to navigating by our names.

What fool ever fell in love with a game?

Swirling green and gold catching quick
on the globe, Dayspring, Dayspring,
creating a new circumference,
never catching on to the difference.

To love that, the way it is— Dayspring—
always witness to the rise of some fallen thing.

Powerless to row back against ceaseless resistance.
Powerless to preserve any kiss.
Powerless to defend the squishy bodies of them I love.
Powerless to freeze my wishes in the menagerie.
Powerless to do without, without, without.
Powerless to magick kindness out of malice.
Powerless to stop the tar from bubbling.
Powerless to go where day demands nothing.
Powerless to reverse cuts glimpsed on skin.
Powerless to will the wheeling needle backwards.
Powerless to rally nerves out of nervousness.
Powerless to numb my sex senseless.
Powerless to bandage the gilded bleeding of fate.
Powerless to intervene in my parent's meeting.

Powerless to stop them from committing the far-reaching accident of creating me.

The Once and Future Dayspring

IV.

Tough if not impossible
to determine when
sex, sex, sex,
graduated from word—
sensual, abysmal sex—
to become world.

Tough to suss out
the use, the trial and error
of thought refuse.

The way it is,
we discover by feeling
without impulse to
duck or cover,
evading biological bombs.

Bombs!
They malign the surface,
unraveling in kind.
No one cares for their origin.
They bow, and blow up,
disseminating destinies
and popping brain bubble.
Does despair
deserve your attention now?

I dig deep
for the memory of when
blank became buck,
where beyond the touch
was another touch,
and behind the intrepid smile
another smile just as intrepid,
and livid licking of the lips,
what head-spin, what world
was I getting involved in?

Fire! For fuck's sake
you keep standing in fire,
your vision tunneling
deeper than the canals
of my crumbling capital.
You like the pain, 

the dwindling of your vitality,
you watch your life drain
and wait for someone
to join your party.

The Once and Future Dayspring

III.

To go with the team,
that is the charge and privilege
of the modern gladiator.

To make murder
mercurial, to wring out time
and bottle it.

To surprise
with freshly-caught calculations
in canopy shadow.

To repurpose
my neuroses, drenched
in deep-sea music.

To pluck
the hunter's bow and hear
laughing.

To continue
the poem viciously cycling,
until rest rents you.

To delight
fingers for dance and eyes
for devour.

To forge
a funneling crater deep
into throbbing skull.

To gain
velocity, intensity, ferocity,
in installments of blunders.

To lose
no what, no why, but who,
and what reason to quit?

Dayspring—

To never wasting,
relenting or turning around.
To go ahead, instead.

Taking Names

Upstairs, downstairs,
I go where
the word finds voice.

I go where
our impending choice
has not disseminated:

unknown, uninitiated,
undeterred, unswayable,
unremarkable, unbreakable.