Following on my post about nonchalance, a meditation on how we accidentally fence ourselves in:
This is not a gate. My soul
is passable; I keep control
of any blemish in my fate.
This is how I always dress
to show the absence of a mess:
a wall of iron lightly tressed,
but not a fence. I hate pretense.
This is not a [...]
I found the entrance to the sky where I
could never hope to be, where I could see
empires of fog (upstaging my existence)
caught in trysts with stone insanity.
I found it slashed in walls so high
that all my thoughts collapsed beneath the ground
to thrash in luscious silence and rebound
against their obfuscating sophistry.
I found the entrance to the [...]
mosaic: from Medieval Latin musaicum, “work of the Muses.”
Hard shard shatter flinty break
unfashion forge repair untear unfake
create sharp fragment shrapnel make inchoate
show grow grapple. Unwrap happiness. Glass
splinter light extracting fact, impact;
raw wrecked caressingly, careen keen urgent
beauty perfect merging tender free.
Tunnel along thin straits of concrete light
inlaid in gaps where night draws near to night;
discard the destination of your brief
and endless road, and let the iron leaf
drift 60 m.p.h. down asphalt streams,
until a sudden exit ramp redeems
your consciousness. Live here in hurried hours,
crossing old terrain of foreign powers,
archaic worlds where the midnight blue
contains electric stars, [...]
I want to be
the flicker of a firefly:
strand of sun with wings and feet,
pinpoint passion of yellow heat;
and find a way to live and die
concisely free
I wish I were a phoenix, so I could die
succinctly at the end of every day
and wake the next reborn, and, while I pray,
pack all my life in one short day’s supply.
I’d never let a single minute lie
misspent across my pyre, or throw away
the precious pith of friendship. I would say
I care about you now, [...]
