Manna (To each his own)

Letters, he said,
are all right-angles
twenty-six conduits
for simple acquisition.
Put your words on the shelf
at night, unpack only
what you need. Stop
mistaking typewriters
for altars. My dear,
your pencil’s not a paintbrush.
The consequence of sound
ends at the softest
decibel.

Why do you need a word
for homeless planets,
the heritage of solitary stars?
Why do you assign
meaning to the gasp
of wonder when you look
out the window and see
home, a cityscape,
an ancient horizon
you can trace with your index?

A miracle doesn’t need
a legacy, I said,
but how can you live that way?
When you lay beside
the river’s midnight lurk,
swans asleep in hidden
nests and yellow ragweed
in your hair, look up-
watch waves of savage wings
and wind roaring over
your head. Believe this
is why ancient Greeks
fashioned myths and heroes
from our galaxy’s rollicking war-cry.
Lean with your whole
body towards the churning
hour and consecrate
rugged euphony with your own
surprised shout, pure
and ephemeral adoration.

All of this and heaven too.
Bless the man who christened
each wisp of earth-hewn pulchritude
the hands that consecrated
these ephemeral gifts,
sonic revelations carved into stone.

17.10.15

I am understood ?

Vertiginous welter of lingual interplay,
and my head’s rolling on its brittle axis
and I’m stumbling through a labyrinth
of demiurge illuminations and taciturn mouths.
And as hours flee from the crepuscule of hope to starless void
I’m chasing whispers that evaporate
into august nothingness,
scraps of meaning that flee from urgent fingertips.
The sedulous persistence that brought me to this
apogee of babylonian damnation
won’t break my fall.

Do you understand what I’m trying to say ?

These walls know something you don’t honey,
and you better get used to it,
pressing your fingers to the cracks,
asking for doors
where there’s only ever been
millennia of unutterable secrets.
Indelible quiescence carved into a sibylline face.
You’re a half-raised fist, ill-fated gesticulations
infantile phrases that can barely
make it past your quivering lips.

Does anyone comprehend a smile these days?

I don’t need fervent pantomime to make my point,
or to implore the strange antique portal
trembling in its obdurate frame.
Just tell me that you’ve been there,
on the tremulous crossway between illumination
and dismal obscurity,
that belligerent skulls of ireful diatribes
never forced your eyes to the ground,
that you know these roads and streetposts

even if you never found out the name
of the ancient stones rolling on under your feet.

Stirring

There are these
words, glittering in my palm
like obliterated glass,
christmas lights,
reverent stones
gathered at the bottom
of the illimitable river of language.

they fluster and shake
their heads and trip
over themselves,
a tremendous back
space of thought and unsettled
phrase, they

stutter and flail
their trembling wings
a mad quorum of sound.

unsure of their
long lettered bodies
wayward adolescents passing
the amber bottle,
twisting the lock on the door.
Still in their tremulous nascence
and churning.

A miracle of bodies,
a star-washed nativity,
phenomenon of tablet and holy tools.

Stuttering, then
an agitation of wings.