all your dreams collapse to alpha waves
mystical REM revelations find a frozen foundation
flickering falsehoods from which you finally wake
to see the ash around you falling, calming snow, burned expectations
newspapers yellowed, unburned, stacked, neatly piled along matte black paths
down which you stumble, drunk with consequences,
forgotten headlines, age-pressed pages, serifed typeface
called Regret, kitschy elegance, clever crossbars, mocking beaks,
an infinity of sweet words overripe and rotten
you remember when your lovers love their others
discarding you and former things foolish and fallacious;
aluminum poles, wind-pickled, hollow, would howl if wind
still were to animate them, anchored in the papers;
leaning weary, heavy, wiping powdered brow against
a noir raincoat’s sleeve worn long years through the drought
to find the pipes too weak to hold you and your leanings, illusory:
each time an iron clamp of recall clicks too late
when the smell of burning bids you cough and you abstain,
knowing the futility of expectoration, as though through
sneezing or ejaculation one recovered love.
you find yourself a eunuch for lack of trust in saccharine words
spoken bodily with quivering calculation, intuitions compelling
shuffled, careful steps to destinations unseen, distance choked
black with smoke, soot-smeared sidewalks cracked with freezing swells
of winter hopes that melt with summer’s green; illness, flush of
fever, beads of sweat lapping at the cinders swirling round about,
numberless stinging grains each of a price paid for holding fast in
faith that friendship needn’t fornicate, that proximity plays no part,
that time you fail to find for a friend is time you didn’t care–
while each of these you violate in turn, selfish, condescending,
self-condemning by your words. you return your attention to the path
to enjoy what you can: soft, warm snow, tender crackling,
loving words now forgotten, the sulfur-scent of indelible lessons.
(more…)
