Anacreon’s Place

Open to a fullness
that is seeking to be whole.

Younger traces.
Jade oblivion.
Ambidextrous re-entry.
A world that is new
because you are so old.

Whelm realm
cosmic dream scheme
you mean
I am in this
for real? Not just
nominally?

And I am
incisive
burning
expectant
sorrowful
repentant

not very often though.

The scent off a hunk of
myrrh reminds
you that
you are alive and
pulled into this being
by the very breath that
powders the bones and powers
the phones.

We have been warring this fight too long
against brown beetles over the top of the
shrapnel-strewn trench; those memes
are zipping bullets and the fire flows like wine
off your soft lips and strikes the
mud around me with dense
sizzling hearthrobs.

My heart is broken with the Guards’ lines
at a nameless field on the steppes,
bare to the horizon, but for broken metal and
gashed earth and red jets of arterial blood I can’t
scrub from my mind, or from under my fingernails,
nor the stench of death. Vodka is redundant,
but welcome.

I miss you like a hole in the head.
The hole in my memories whispers
your name.

Tradition and the individual talent’s wisps of metaphor congeal into healing clots to stir your Bloody Mary, whose unlives continue to shed apple juice, with joy, and aplomb.Confutation of expectation respecting the differences harmonize the imbalance that boils in the kettle between sheets of chain mail glowing red hot to celebrate green newness twisted and seared to ash.

Thomas Stearns in a waffle iron fights off terrorists
with body odor alone.

speech goes out reminding me
that we are a One that
is a minus, mathless and
assless, a Logos without
substance

weeds speak to each other on the
gopher-eaten lawn

the well gushes blood down the hillside
washing away the weeds wiping
the town off the face of the earth

ochre mudslide repixellates the
avatars in that town

which is after all only a symbol
for the tatoo I just had the surgeon
scrape off the inside
of my skin.

When you lose someone, way too soon, it’s like someone dropped a wrench into the cogs and gears of your chest and you spurt oil onto the carpet and the Masters are furious, before they throw you into the landfill. But you can’t feel, so it doesn’t bother you.

When you lose a thing you were, a metal leg perhaps, and are suspended over a snakepit in the desert, you know no fear, because, as mentioned, you can’t feel anything. And the snakes won’t get their dinner, because you are made of metal, and quite undigestable.

Your hulk rusts on the salt flats. On the lakeshore a hundred kilometers away, the ventricled flesh that was once in your chest pumps blood onto the rock, and thumps shrieking agony to twinkling sky.

Your metal self moans, and you don’t know why.

Hill’s gray-clad division held the gap
for three hours. We attacked
again and again and finally pushed through
the North Carolinians behind
a stone wall, but at terrible cost.
Life spectra were slashed that day -
agglomerations of beauty and vivid
human-ness - that will probably never
be seen again so straitly configured.
We threw sixty confederate corpses
down Farmer Wise’s well, and
paid him $60 compensation.

I now know
that a human life
is worth exactly
$1.