Rain in a Forest of Leaves

The cannon sounds, their eyes strike sparks,
the cavalry stampeding quickens
and tastes water spilled like blood.

From the woods, from the night,
to wage war on the doldrums and secure
the virgin beauty of the light of a hundred streetlamps
and the loyalty of an endless armada,
the breath of a ceiling of stars.

The cold of their cries comes first;
then the crash of the light in their eyes, then the sound.
The cavalry drums to itself and it quickens and quickens,
it follows the voices of windchimes and trains
running fast before day.

Portrait of a Woman Weeping

God, there is a woman in the street,

a woman with rain running down

between her breasts, across her skin,

to clothe her in water as her nudity is magnified

droplet by droplet by droplet.

A woman in the street, her eyes forever

aimless wandering in all directions,

standing frozen-cold and still,

hands rippling the air, breasts bared

to a naked world through water;

a woman of rain.

God, drowning.

I Run and Run

Between two trees, two souls,

two pairs of eyes,

were met.

My own, my world-reverting windows;

the unknowable depths of the eyes of a doe.

Black orbs reflecting brightness more

than ink and darkness fathomless

has ever done elsewhere.

Encompassed by the woods,

the green and stillness,

by the water and wind and their words,

separated with a gateway of two trees and longing so

to cross a threshold of well-thriving earth

and intermingled, twining roots.

My body in the gentling breeze,

naked and defenseless but for clothes;

a space of empty nothingness of twenty feet;

a soft and supple unease:

movements of a doe in the woods.

The space before my life,
in all my eyes, in all I'll one day hope to be,

in the voice of the wind and the hands of the trees bereft,

wherefrom a doe, frightened, left me and fled.

Emptiness echoes from the sylvan spaces,

echoes:

"

Cain,

you son of Cain,

I run, and run

from you.

"

A forest sounds its depths and finds its echoing in me.

Kings

The work of decades is accomplished in a moment,

the dreams of kings and fabled castle ramparts

are thrown down and travestied in ruin

in the ground beneath the surface earth,

the superficial soil of a heart or its conviction.

Build, hammer and build and create where once,

a moment past, a moment more, was nothing.

Here am I, will you take me? Will anyone take me?

Is redemption here standing,

or has the poet cast a question mark,

inverted desperate fishing hook

amidst a straining sea of torrential ink?

There, another king, I see him.

A king in a purple cold wrapped up,

marked over by his own transgressions

and unwashable stains in his eyes.

These will cleanse me, he cries of his tears, they will do it by heat.

The king of the world is a fabric ill-set in his seat.

Awaiting the weight of the world on weak shoulders

and bones that are yet to be born,

the lord of the empire is drowning in shame;

he is made by all subjects

the subject of scorn.

Melting Dali Clocks as You

An anatomical description of metaphor in best intent

to demonize the miserable oppressed and trod-upon in seeking out

the greatest love and longest sentences, like lakes in

droplets falling on a dew of green and envious nothing to hold the

wasted pieces in my broken blood and weep the silent screams

and lie upon a back of porcelain feeling.

This intent to mediocrite the stance of true sacrificial,

to shout and true till the depths, exhausted, fall into slumber

like the bitter clouds that sit upon an empty grave.

This is all I am today.

Tell me and I promise.

Tune to melody, and working in reverse is fine to feel out the shuddering

contours of a beauteous frame before the sheets give way of white to stain.

Beauteous and marred, thus trembling and holding out the crimson

to examine the status of a virgin soul upon the cracks

as hope and truth and innocence coagulate.

Decadence, be it far from me, further detached from those

it needs to powering them for it be.

Hold and repeat the rifle till there is no more felt upon to stick the powder

in burning for the world to fall

until the decay becomes as low and filth and despair to hope the time

of melting Dali clocks as you.

Noontide by the falling lakes;

recycle imagery to keep the knowing strong,

to lean upon not understanding your own truth, and fall.

Coerce me into a pit of pink elephants

and blue tigers

in order so successive

that may fall and spell oblivion,

fall, fall, fall!

You desperate reflection of a broken pulse gone cold!

Near Eden

All my life is lived through windows;

today the glass has sprouted gazing-globes of rain

and, to watch the world, I run my vision through them both.

Bent, reflect-refracted and changed, two streetlamps, double-headed,

rest their glowing faces in the cloudy sun,

one and one and one and one,

a pair of snoring sentinels on either side

of a flagpost without a flag.

Away from this, behind a swollen fence of rain, a satellite dish,

too large, too inefficient, too there

to have been born in the last ten years,

is missing several of its wire wings stretched out like webbing

on the space between the sixteen radii reaching away

from the central arm, still calling,

still moaning in echoes for stars.

I do not know what is its metaphor;

but it is broken

and it is beautiful,

and I find that it is worth so much

in bravely being worth so little.

* * *

God, is the rain or is the glass a window?

God, when did Eden draw so near?

God, were we all sleeping?

* *

Were we sleeping?

*

Paper-Okie Hands

Create anew these old and tired veins running thick with dust,

course fresh blood to quench aching hands.

Cold, crackling, paper-Okie hands.

This is no graveyard ground in to bury spent roses,

petals gone to rape like violent waste,

thorns like bones like blackened bleeding

bent and felled into the earth!

Warm streams instead for planting,

tending veins;

grow a field of lilies

not made for red

or flowering for the hands

that will lose for them virginity.