– 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
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