Words

Interregnum

– a pause or interruption in continuity –

“What keeps us here?”

You, all small voice and curls, ask.

A query tongue-tumbled and rash,

yet lucid as the roseate dawn

cracking yolk-orange

over the Eastern edge.

 

A listless sky in early alchemy,

deploying a blithe radiance

through star-spun strata

hung with collaborative dust

from street-bound ventures,

quotidian, abundant, and rushed.

 

By mid-day, a dingy halo;

stuck, wound-sodden gauzy,

into mists make-believe.

An apocryphal wall,

exultantly suspended,

encircling all.

 

A spit-dry earth thirsts below,

bellowing barren and restless,

as furry little spiders,

emboldened by rain respite,

spin glistening webs

‘cross leaves equally desperate.

 

This Delphic time, rakish and incoherent,

lusts after an ice-green evening

to splash sincere over the hot ingots

warming our collective boredom,

yielding never to fatigue

but finally to misfortune.

 

Lackluster in its semi-sentient embrace

and assumed autonomy,

it collapses slackjawed

into gushing torrents of inky federation,

mottled by cobalt bursts of laughter

and distant conversation.

 

And as night falls thick,

we must dive heedless

to the seafloor of a bottomless ocean;

aloof to those that

dampen our living light,

inimitable and golden.

 

Reaching a seething reef,

teeming with sessions of structural silence,

we shall drive our roughhewn tent stakes

deep into the twisting sand,

and start life anew,

regardless of unanswered questions.

 

 August 2016


Efflorescence

Yesterday, an efflorescence of maturation

like wizened salt rings

on slate walls.

 

Commingling glacially,

post-culturally;

a future Singapore

here on the skin of my alley.

 

A migration through porous,

permeable material.

Derridean hospitality:

Upon my doormat,

you may shake your boots.

Upon my cupboard,

you may place your tools.

 

An essential process

eventually coating the surface.

A deep, in-born upwelling

here on the skin of my alley.

 

He that once was someone for me

used to snap shots of this stuff.

Then I walked away.

An efflowering of his mid-century curtness,

grazed away like leather shavings

coiled across a cobbler’s workshop,

wormy and dissolute.

 

A shrugging off of the final apology;

upending the act of shameful retrospection

before it’s hooves grip the sheer granite edge.

 

Upon my doormat,

 you may shake your boots.

Upon my cupboard.

 you may place your tools.

 

On the skin of my alley,

you may scrawl your salute:

“The sun is coming, hide your flowers.”

May 2017