Dream as if a lost child

By the fermented seaside

Encasing memories as if shells

Hands running into rivers

Of vertical salt amongst hissing geysers

Great watery laughter twisted

To the eyes’ starry void

 

Shadows beckoning the horizon

Within grilles of clouds

Hissing, frothing, deliberate

Mourners of the caravan and autumn

 

I am the lighthouse of darkness

I. Amidst echoing, graphitized pines

Fire ants gag oblivion’s jar

Gifting their Queen

Granulated, bruised diadems

II. Foamy wombs where the sea

Still throbs, black and white

And a lighthouse brings forth

Daughter of hope, thistle beret

I. My heart is a river of song

Within your atlas of miracles

In the rafters of despairs

Beneath the gutters

Of high stars

And the padlocks of our mouth

II. The trains of rhythm ensconcing

Fervent springs

Undressing to tunnels

Of nude fortepianos

In brisk symphonies of flour

And brumal florist’s delight

Let us be the seams of kisses

Within the garment of love

And foamy dreams in the night’s

Shadowy net of carp

My Laura of laurels

 

Copulating clouds

In trousers of stars

Silent affair of the portico

And the road peppered

With milk-cartons, green colts

Two women dreamed they were

Carousels, mares entwined

Conjoined song rising from insomnia

And Lachesis’ scissors

Love is two obscurities

Devoured a sole match

And interrogated by the leafy tunnel of lies

 

My soul is a rollercoaster

Barefoot in oily portals to wards

Abstinent flesh infiltrated by sunray, stamen, sting

Unleavened phantoms lovemaking in the Ferris wheel

And the circles of arms, spinning oblivion into jars

Cutting hearts into rivers of song

 

Your eyes are but tormented manors

Aching rails,

Destiny breaking loose on jasmine, spindles, needles

I’m a thimble, a thorn, you are a star

 

Lust is a stereo sedating pinwheels

Seducing pines of drunkenness

Love is but an envious gramophone

Half comatose, ashen lips

She goes crazy without the amusement or climax

And hangs herself in the gallows of her tresses

With a pamphlet to Venus’s carillons

 

Transients of shadows in amorphous trains

Destined to some Wonderland

Neglect the world in sepia

And each child bloodied,

Throttled with coming of age

Ligatures of foreskins, tassels

Final gasp of a blood-clod

Kneeling, praising clemency

To the nun of cigarettes

And the 13^th streetlamp, thistle-clad

 

I long for her eyes,

Kindling of my unkempt existence

You rained wounded poppies

To last the eternity of a caress

But the moist nets of desire

Encapsulated my bony diadems

Padlocked souls, destined pallor,

Sleepy aroma of kisses that

Encircled shadowy trains asleep

In underpasses acquainted to my heart,

Undressing mirrors envying ashen windows,

Where death lurks as if a switchman

And oblivion in stubs of aged voyages

 

Let me imagine the earth

Before it germinated roots

With drowned swimmer arms

Us before we were entwined

Bliss before it bore you,

Daughter of hope,

Conductor of autumnal violas

Switchboard operator for spring’s wakeup call

Here I love you between

Abrupt bursts of ivy and fiery graveyards

 

Love is brawling lightning

Dissolving into a drop of transparent honey

Thorny stars unleashing insomnia’s fragrance

I and you converging into we,

Half bloody, half empty, half dead

 

Remember, Magdalene

The day consumed her in entirety

With its pincers of haste,

Numbered and ticketed her 227th

Names as if butterflies fleeing chrysalises of beds,

Once, errant pupae of condoms weaned on conscience

Death pacing in telephone coils, windowpanes, wombs

And birth in those same hushed objects

 

Acrobat of matches upon the

Chaotic trapeze as if a pendulum lurching toward

Balconies of sorrows and their dove overcoats

Tightropes of headstones and tresses

I, a scarecrow decommissioned by twilight

In the sea of sirens and cherubs,

Armrests subdued by limelight

Bosom of bullets, sheepish grin

In my palm Mary’s orange rind

Traversing a sky of inkwells, Christmas lights

Milk cartons, felt storks, Zyklon pendants

 

Tell me it’s blue and starry and nude:

Her voice and your womb

Tell me it’s grotesque outside

But deep inside it must be beautiful

Like a set of eyes or an octet of pawns

A dozen sextants or a vastness of elm

Or a solitary serendipity in brothels of needles

Or my sister filling another tulip

And perhaps our silhouettes in silkscreens

Among the vagueness of July 28

Potting the dollar store’s roses

In jars brimming with inaccessible crumbs

Of time on her platter along

With peace and war and oceans of cherries

And the fish of hope

 

 

Flour of Flowers:

I. My soul grows weary in chrysalises

Unfurling into mother-of-pearl fronds

Of destiny’s bough,

Simple hand in nostalgia’s ravaged galaxy

Night’s brinks seducing the eyes: barefoot, nude, azure

Sand grains of every son, toenail of every daughter

Stinging nettles of every sister, eternity of bellowing mirrors

 

II. Taxis sedating a pothole-bruised artery

Peopled with crystal laughter

Procession of blood, thorny stars

Our miseries imploring storks

Memories mugging butterflies

The moon is a debutante

In the stoic world

Of unshod metals

Here, intoxicated poppies

Are rooted and weeping:

Without the florist’s

Morphine earthenware

Daydream inducing syringes

Abrupt dusts of honey

 

III. I dreamed we were anchors

Within the ganache sea,

Encircling in man-eating bows

Port of bitter youth, moist net of desires-

Thieving our shadowy fish of hope,

Ladyfinger fedoras, coils entwined in insomniac voltages

Foamy laughter dissipating within transient encounters

 

IV. Nascent comets evading the earth’s caffeinatedurn

And our widowed lies:

The spiders disentangled last Tuesday

From muddled infirmaries

Of ink, brine, wombs

I. My soul is an inkwell

Among shadowy proxies

Eternities of Skype calls

Coagulating on the unfurling

Book of brine with understudies

Of suicidal waves

A dove for each page-break

A bloodstain for each inquiry

Shivering in sandy bosoms

 

II. Your name in smoky syllables

The drunkard consumed for Passover

Atop the thorny Via Dolorosa

Jesters with the muddled laughter

Of a tree whose trunk encapsulated

An obituary of our love (and my crystal timepiece)

Within the golden chapel, Peddlers

Gorged on starry cornbread, crusty horizons

 

III. Our roots entwined the pew

Great anthems of light rising

From shady hymnals, which my sister ignited

Last Wednesday allied with Goring’s phantom

 

IV. We thieved matches

And ate poppies from the row of crosses.

Our arms coalesced into them after

Crows gagged the scarecrow-

A ligature of ant queens

Nuptial wombs of hushed foragers

Fleeing Rasputin’s honeyed globe

And a lone weaver on the looms of dawn

An undone love in a zipper of husks

 

V. Oblivion dressed like a seamstress

Impregnated with misery

Death that humiliated supervisor

When the weaver only jarred

Tulips with bruised panniers

Oily kisses; She was rootless

We existed in tubers of laughs

In each others’ hearts of cards

Vermillion king on snowy deathbed

Our love performing euthanasia

To become despair

 

VI. Toasts becoming dreamy butterflies

The world is a carousel

And stars those dingy mares

Wafting tune: spring’s wakeup call

To chisel marble effigies of clouds

And dissolve her green eyes

Into rivers of sprigs

With an isle of an admiral and a debutante

Infatuated beneath inky skies the comet-poet

Pondered about while in slumber

Wind that pimps a butterfly

Toward abstinent windows

Taciturn bridges moored onto sunned skies

Here, Death loved you

 

Mother-of-pearl street-lamps

Among twilight’s transient foam-veins

Blue-eyed river of semen, mirrors

My brother enthralled with himself

 

Poppies reunited within syringes

Wombs of ashtrays, hearts of tiny cowbells

Emporiums vending syllables, prosthetics, breath

My daughter seduced by a mannequin

 

Train-wrecked heart

In a cool underpass of penuries

Souls dissolving into silhouettes atop sundials

My mother courting a phantom

 

Vivacious flower

Asleep in oblivion’s jar

Resurrected into shadowy honey

I loved an effigy

I smelled of jasmine, brine, you

In the vagueness the stars tinge the never-ending sky

The moon wakes and enables her waves

And you rest on a foam-laden cliff

In a diadem of inebriated stars

 

O lonely rose enacting tears,

Dreams draped in sad suits of light

 

The butterfly implacable on freedom

Perches on the naked trees of winter

 

Abyss filled with life, Silence with sound

 

The nameless wind razes lighthouses

The incessant sea paves forests of flowers with sand

 

Here, you bring forth the only infinite love

In the form of blue crystals and thistles

Flowerless, flightless, full of life