Through the cast of oak roots, and the twisted soil
(the land takes a breath for every human life:
and the impossible course of mountains sway towards new doom,
the life-lines of water arch with violence
just before death in that terrible common of azure sighs;
the waves do not cease breath on earth’s sand-riddled frame,
they do not wilt in the canyons –
nor in their faces, dreamt from crimson stone –
nor in the shade of love, diving the moonlit eye
that blinks at once over the sex of starlight on sea,
of the lustrous confluence
between heaven
and the Pacific: fluxing ballet of infinite silver,
no, the waves carry on:
as a tear bursts over sand, an ant will drown in the fragments,
a suicide will bloom the prudence of one’s joy,
the happy will die before death.
The promises of sunsets will fail the fading soldier
who kisses his lover on the torrid battlefield.
Crippled by his wound’s ravines,
he will taste that sky in his lips, and he will know.
Grief will scar a generation.
A girl will dream of love and invite rape through the front door.
Blood spilled is blood flowing through the greater pulse
of that greater heart, lying between madness and lust,
avarice and power, to which there beats no end . . .
Even the zero’s of poverty
mark those responsible with dark stains of newsprint
and ruined headlines that tumble down Wall St.
A word can bury cities.
There is no severance.
The puppet-
strings are strummed
like harps to lift the hand
to bow a finger to mark a note in the fluid air
from an ear of song divulged
like a bullet lodged in the wind
shot from the fire of dawn written by seeds
of poetry bursting, departing their weeds that writhe from the soil
lifting puppet strings that blur with humming bird’s wings to stir the aspen’s leaves that punish the heart with beauty’s promise of autumn decay flashing on a highway of the dead, one to the next, pain to pain, embraced at last in wheel chairs and sterile white beds to boil the prison of flesh to rectify the soul from the sea from the gulls from the sand from the grass from the hills and the shade in the contortion of the willow the shape of sadness in one last glance back in the tone of an eye in the stripe of a blade in the end of one breath as the earth moves once more and a child is born and a family is carved by the shift of a wave that breaks on the strings and begins once again, anew . . .
Let lovers affirm their hatred as love! There is no end, there is no end, the passion endures beyond its beginning; it has seethed from within the bone as it bloomed beyond the stars)
I can hear the voices of the poisoned communion.
I was alone, and I have never been.
Solace is written in everything.
You are my words, I am your shadow of sense, that glimmering mark in your dreams of one night, and every crushing darkness since.
Return to me the will to open my eyes, to scream, riven from my mother’s body, and drown in the exhaustive pulse of the universe . . .
Breathe.