Il nome suo nessun saprà

The distal sun discharged some pointellated light

that dumped the graphics in his head. And bled

the world, like seeps of watercolor paint, like spume

afloat in French seascapes, where doves returned
to shore and dolphins lapped in gentle arcs, 
splashing, shooting forth, again they lashed, again

like sun-streaked artillery fire, swimming artful loops
against the linseed canvas smeared in cochineal

and violent gold, the artist's chef d'œuvre. The trash

engorged itself on phlegm and spittled air. And flared

the shock of white that thrashed his starving brain.

The stench, the stain, the bloat, the ripped-off face,

the shriveled flesh, the vomit. The piss of cats.

The bellicose swell of hunger bruised his cerebellum.

Vincerò.

The universe of blood that warmed his fingertip
converged upon the pistol grip.
The detonating sun split open his pupils

like light splittered through prismatic crystal
because he always was cut open,
slit throat to lip, splattered dry, and broken.

He breathed like an animal. No longer any sissy fag.

It wasn’t how they fell but how they flinched

that made him feel strong. It was the grandeur

that he needed. I could tell. No one else noticed,

but the bodies formed a perfect trapezoid

as the blood spooled in spirals, like the arms

of ancient galaxies, caressing a child as he cried.


Note: The title is a reference to Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."

God to Adam

So why the sudden lust for apples,

their sudden overpresence in your mind?

Perhaps it is your pride that grapples

with busting fruit, as if you were confined

to dumps of dust within the garden,

as if you mustered long for scraps, a rind,

a pit, and felt the hunger harden.

Don’t prattle pap for godly pardon.

Don’t prate about your holy hard on.

Confess your human faults and I’ll forgive

and give you clumps of clod and let you live

in hell. Sure, blame the girl and bluster

that she ensnared you in a fluster

of sin and stain and skin, while knowing
she’d blush and shake and blame the fucking snake

and never name the urge you couldn’t slake.

You fake! What appetite was growing

that bade you prance about in fig-leaved shame?

Speak, coward! Thirst for knowledge as you claim

or ache for ripened flesh? I’ll tell you what,

go find that girl and brand her primal slut

and temptress whore. Then see what lies begot:

the worm, the cut, the wound, the cankered clot.

See that? Just watch it, watch that apple rot.

Note to poem:
The words I wrote were "godly pardon."
Don't read the rhyme as "Dolly Parton."
I know it's feminine, you privileged prick.
But I'll wield a spear like any Spartan
and stick its tip into your sexist shtick.

Advice to a 13th-Century German Minnesänger

Just scorn the dawn and reap the vine. Don’t keep

concealing how the colors rage, how sunset emigrates

amid recidivistic flames that flake to scattered sea.

Not all pearls loose temporal shells to slip from lore.
Not all waves find another beach. You must break

but not too soon, you must not breach before the bay.

Recede from Grecian statues bound to sand and time,

whose feet are ripped to tide along the sepulcher of shore
before an inscribed skull whose glyphs reveal your name.

Beside your relic bones there lies a book of lyric verse

and lyres lost to Orpheus, when Eurydice died

the second time, the tune that sang his life alive.

He wept for so much melody. She caught his breath

within the falling universe, and held him out

in weaves of verse, in tomes now hushed to time.

This is your holocaust of dust, a burning book

that reads from back to front, each withered page

remade unlived, the silence desiccated twice.

Begin the legend anew tonight. Let lightning lash

from dawnwind, let it bathe manuscripts in breeze

that razes oil lamps, and bids an image enter in.

Now reconstruct the primal light. With no new words

to sing the genesis of grief, invent an alphabet

of pulsing wave on wave through waves of light.

Primeval galaxies redshift to sight. The sky appears

transduced to sifting winds through crumbling clouds

of pink and blue. Its translation is ever lost in you.

Its colors flare within the flask of everlasting light

whose depths you cannot quench. Now drink

of this desire to swallow evening’s solar green.

Now drink of this desire. Your life is overlived

but linger yet. When overladen branches bloom

in long-lapsed blue, a dreamblown memory returns.

It is the changeling sea, dissolved to babblings of foam,

who bids you slip your ear beneath her slumberous depths

and hear the speech that wanders, lost amid her forms.

Meander through the nettlebloom, and sleep

amid the poppy shade. Pluck the berries earth bestows

and taste the netherspeech. Leave a handful for the dead.

The tang speaks death into your mouth. Again and again

a ripe fullness flares upon your vine-leaf lips, and bursts

the slow namelessness that clods your sentient mouth.

Uni-verse

I.
You write a poem. You have made the universe’s ridge,

a purple turning violet, an uprisen lark bellishing in blue

jubilation, who swings a single wing against the tyrant sun

and swipes away the light. When the skylark starts to soar

it means the coming wraith of war. When the sky implodes

in rage, it means your blood dies dry on page. Hush

little poet, don’t speak a word. Under charnel vaults

not a gasp is heard. All time is silent where your corpse

rots interned. And if that risen lark should sing, just strive

within the milky edge of wing, the forge-wrought flail

of feathers flaking flames and flinging fire. The world falls

to different rebels now, as maelstroms of whitened hail

shatter air to whiter hail in shrapnelled apogee, a flash

of dawnblasted ice that lashes nerve from bone, a fresh

apotheosis of fluttered cries dissolved to sovereign sound.

II.
It is a theater of solar wind and crumbling cloud, a play

with no proscenium, no final act, and no denouement.

It is pulsing wave on wave through rushing waves

on splurging pips of particles through flowing forms

of forms on metamorphoses of gushing primal light.

It is light transformed to orange churned red by space

expanding, elselands of concealings rippling like sand

made rock turned sand again. It is a remembered time,

a half-time, a para-time, curved by the planetary poem.

It is a poem upon a plate, a pâté of poïesis, fat, fat

poïesis, a giant’s poem, a poem of rumpled plums.

Fie, fie for so much plump poïesis, fee-fie-fo-fum,

such lascivious labials, fie-fum, licentious liquids,

fee-fie, frittered plantain fricatives. Pardon, pardon

such rude and bulging blues, these rustic reds

which ought to be a famished, fusty gold. Forgive

the prinking pinks. Sorry about the orange-vermeil.