The Midnight Hour

The cold side of my bed, red velvet
Untouched but by my hands
Stretching in half yawn and half a desire
Towards the table lamp
Wobbling upon a hairpin
Left long ago
By some fair maiden
Made of watercolor.
Her’s were the feet
That last felt the rough carpet
And ruffled it’s fur the other way
So she could see herself better
In the mirror across the hall
Draped in rutilant rays;
Those rashes of love
I left, crawling upon her eggshell skin
Every midnight
When I tasted terror through shuttered windows
And felt the curtains
Stand, solid in the wind
Like a frozen moonbeam
Sequin with dust
To mimic purposeless limbs
Warm glistening skin
Pulsing against denial and dirt
That awaits all men
Beyond this mortal ken; gossamer thin.
My numb fingers
Polished thus with prophecy
Brushes aside the labyrinthine light
So the table lamp falls; and all fur is on fire,
And wax walls swell
In ersatz desire
While the hairpin, blue steel,
Fragrant with pine
Swivels endlessly upon the edge,
Her chimera, a restless womb;
The desire to die
Without ever being born
And be beautiful forever
Having never being torn.

Her Frock and My Flower

She danced at my funeral
In White gown stained with red
And prayers poured through
Limestone lips
That prosaic charcoal charade.

She had a face
That was more mine than my own
When I wilted under blanket, soft
As a foam dripping molasses
Over tired thoughts undressing in nubile light
All purveyors to those gestures
Of that one forbidden rite
Which holds Sky in a bowl
The Earth in a spoon
An ocean in a raindrop
And all chaos in cocoon.

In my arms
Holding the hems of both horizon
Split open at the end
She was undented,
Pale fire; silver gardenia in twilight,
Her sinuous laughter
As dry sprigs clapping in the wind
Raising waves of surrender and unchanging void
Breaking over boulders
I shaped each night, with
Hammer on heart, in a vaccumed voice
So the vestal salt
Do not linger and stain
My guillotine hands
In culpable pain.

She tasted of water
Woven in my veins
With flesh as cotton, left open in the rain
The lake was on her lashes
A swan astride her sighs
And the colors of the world
In the white of her eyes
And then I, a pariah, stood waking in her palm
Having slept through tempests
To return in that calm
Where each drop of desire
Shone like crystal in a cave
Raisin buds flowering
Wave after wave
In that palpable dark
Through same souls set bare
Behind walls and their worshippers
Left unaware.

She danced at my funeral
In White gown stained with red
And prayers poured through
Limestone lips
That prosaic charcoal charade.

A Writer’s Elegy

If only I had
The mind of a mason
I could have built
A manor without a message.

Alas, here I am
Knee deep in the mud
Nipping the flowers already blossomed
In search of a new bud.

Cadaver

My body left behind,
On land no longer mine,
Shall know, blood upon It’s brow,
Or a maggot on an earlobe,
Or salt between It’s toes
Shall the sylvan summer breeze
Warm my pallid face
Will the winter’s fierce lips
Keep me blushing red
Would they who make love to life
Watch over me too
Or am I one of those adages
Never to be new
How many years hence before It shall be found,
Will there be roses where I lay,
Or a bare patch of ground
How farther must one fall
To know the depths of men
And prove compassion is an art
And question this honest end:
Why people who love the light
Cannot fight for a piece of shade
Why they who talk of future
Never walk
Much far ahead