I. My solitude that treads
With pincers of haste
Sextant of bracing hips
Compass but a bloodied rose
Awaking on the invisible stairway
A rustic, cored, comet-beret
Arms of the road,
Rood enfolded in a timepiece
That spews a cuckoo every midnight,
Ariadne’s silk spinnerets each blue-hour
Galoshes of indigent honeysuckles,
Mantle laced with
Autumnal penuries,
Anonymous names

Your eyes as if calderas
Of the bleeding moon
Laden with the fowl of dream:

Stork of alabaster-vellum
Traversing rivers of
Wombs, candid, remote, rings

Firebird in destiny’s bough

Tinsel bowerbirds roosting
In your azure irises,
Auditor with a pen of tears
Within chaos’s wilderness,
Pegs upon the electrified wires
Transfused with heady aromas of hopes

Ashen ravens
Amidst vertical-streams
With wakes, contusions
Encaged in oblivion’s antechamber
Of intoxicated liquors

II. In the night’s depth,
The world is cold,
Even my saltpeter eyes are,
My seized soul
Trees dewy with solitude
Inebriated carillons
Of the pious chapel

But, your hungry heart,
Evanescent lashes
That I crave, as if
A butterfly of melancholy:
Salvation
Or the word woebegone:
Garlands of caresses

Diadem, laughing stars
For your mound of tresses,
Of abloom clouds
Moist, moist skies
Timetables of circadian lilies
Where love dances her frayed rounds
Clockwork of suffering as if
Creepers encapsulating
A vacated soul
Of anguish’s curt tides:
Aching porticos,
Ashy panes

Spring gifted you,
Spring gifted you,
Nostalgia’s pendant
Of March’s maniacal
Fuses of true-repose

III. My solitude wrestles
With the cherry tree’s
Winey-rouge
The nude rain’s bluesy song
Silken mills of chaff
Morphing into stars
Among the archipelago
Of melancholies:

Here, my sorrow capsizes
The tenebrous vessel of your lips
Brimmed with casks of
Backcountry, naïve
Kisses

Carcass of love
Pericarp of obscurities
Darkness’s tubers tingeing
Your solitary voice of sprays
Night’s mesh whitening the
Ichor-stained
Rose of the keel

IV. My heart is but
A snow-globe in
Nostalgia’s
Gelid
Automat
Erect upon the
Inert earth
Crowned by
Ivory skies
Of the mother-liquid
Galaxies with
Ice-wines upon their
Glacial bosoms

You are only a flower
Everything but a flower,
A light, a shadow
A lamp of shades
An inebriate of water
Name that aligns, misaligns

Tell me you’re beautiful, spry, coronet of a carousel, entwined with a solemn pine and the livid brook of hushed lips chanting…

“When my love, Why my love, How my love, Beds are the foam of dreams, Platefuls of Babel’s bliss atop the lover’s basalt-torso, Ariane exonerated in the heart’s seam and his warlike, dove-less mouth, When my love, Why my love, How my loneliness”

I observe with your dimness, hark to your tranquility, subside with your inertness; dream with your insomnia.