Wednesday, July 31, 2024

SOLILOQUY

Things come together like a folding star.
The rug she wore, the halls of solid matter
walked by spirits who can move
through glass and steel.  The painted lines
in vast parking garages, the dances of the drunk
on echoing tar.  The camera picks up
similarities, but God's all-encompassing
cyclops eye sees the sweet differences.

The way the vertebraes corrode
like pillars of separate salt
at the retirement party of a great killer,
in the wounded heel of the usual bandwagon,
laughing his head out, the night
that all the leaves fall off
all the trees at once.

An angel with gem studded wings
and a head of featureless pearl
is guarding my dubious progress.
The path lays jagged as the skids
of many unexpected landings
light shrieks from its corners
like the seeping of a subtle drug.

The thorns of yielding bushes
tell me where I am.  The ham
glazed horizon drops a pineapple circle
on a concrete sidewalk sketch
of the last human hand.
I walked on her dress while she
nakedly commanded the band.

The channels open up like tunnels
of sifted tongues in tapped water.
I left my double like a ghost
on a chain of stools at the local bar.
He multiplies like emptiness tends to
the way reflections shatter
but only so far.  He took the time
so I would need all mine.

In the rain like veins, in the roaring vapor
in the rule of objects over lost creatures
in the sutures they attach between themselves
on bitten clay and rashes of flowers
on cutting boards where colors are cut up
to feed plates decorated with dancing skeletons
subway cars of liquid metal
pouring ferns of bladed silk

a spent hand and a wandering circus
the jitters of a forsaken deity
the scripture of a snail that seals it all
egged windows of an ailing temple
the jungle goes deep and the desert is hard
things come together like a folding star
the fingers of a working monk are the whole yard

and the tag is poison
and the rag sells
but the work is done for the nine realms
and the twelve realms and the infinite realms.

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