Sweet leaf,
Leaflet
Neither the crystal tides
Nor the quartz moon could submerge
The night’s most luminous souls
Or the sunrise line of your brows,
In hours unfastened like roses
And spaciously divided into seagulls
My life grows thirsty
Without your laughter,
Your feet running through the
Gates of my oceanic eyes
Into the shadowy mouth
Of my dream
As if dew,
I undressed your words for
The world to revive
And I planted five flowers
On my chest, on my glass chest
To kiss the earth and sprout
Through your eyes,
To mill honey into
Kisses

Bordellos of hues
Vending their rousing palette-hips
To catcalling canvases
For inaccessible hunks of limelight

You were a clutch of Nativities
Of my piney heart

Woebegone rose with her
Convoys of thorns
Soaked by sirens
Assailed by the submersible
Of foam

You were an unfastened cloud
In the sea of fastened people

Cadaver: an inebriated comet
In a copse of corpses that Cerberus ravaged
Cuticle of the star’s dusting and an ivory-fortepiano
That sounded every Sunday in the golden basilica
With Catrina’s silky palms and the gait of chaff,
Bones as if chimes

You were the bloodied-carnation
Boutonnière, clothing the brumal blazer

Tremulous lies upon the Libra
Dusk’s net encapsulated her breasts
Of gavels undulating as carillons

Justice is a shadowy vessel that partitions
Coexisting moths of dreams and diabolic butterflies,
Promulgates silver handcuffs and lesions,
Bestows hitchhikes to Venus’s opaque-amber pendant of
Petitionaries with prodigal bees, sullen bark
Amidst hot hearts and Emmental-soufflé summits

You were the Giaconda
Among comets of unsought hearts

Pathos of seawalls with coral bayonets
Treading on the sea’s brine tunic
As if a dewdrop sedating an aching window

They approach the estuary of padlocks,
Rescinding their keys to unyielding calm:
Coffee-blotches on the papery sky
Whereas the sea was an inkwell,
Infantile pens of tides pacing through
Twilight’s odes to cold anchors, cool scythes,
Disoriented by the sextant of undressing moons

Where only a machete remains
Ensconced on the lowered flag
Of spume upon which my heartland reverberates
In dove-filled reveries, requiems
Full of lightning clashes, funereal christenings
Wakes of impure eyes, conniving mourners

In you, in you, the seam
Of spring coalescing within nascent hyacinths,
Wringing my tarnished soul and spewing caresses as if
Firebirds in the watery necropolis
Of dandelion stamens
Shivering across chaste notches

So long, I existed in your eyes,
Thyme bosom, jasmine pubis
Sweet, sweet stars, high, high tides!
That in those strange, azure,
Noxious twilights when I took my roots
To another’s archipelago of weeping,
The true-earth felt empty, sordid,
Vacated like an inkwell of notions,

Upturned diadems of roundabouts
Aching porticos brimming with vacant souls
Diminutive geysers of fury

And she was unending like the road of basilisks
You were a primordial tree, star-coronet
Fishes of hope entwined in sublime roots
She was but a coat tree,
Who took my overcoats of sorrows
And whom I departed obliviously
In night’s metallic psyche

I hailed a cab to the bleeding moon
But it submerged in your mouth’s quagmire,
In your mound
Of tresses and I walked the milky world:
A vagabond in cardigans of tears
Asking enigmatically all mortal embers
And pious carillons

“Where did she go, abandoned or stolen?”
“Does she belong to another’s circle of arms
Or the flame’s stiff-ring or the moon’s timepieces?”
“Will I love alone in my mantle of blood?”
“Will she be mired in loneliness or mine?”
“Why did she leave me to wander lunacy’s
Crystalline labyrinth, to die, alone in
Snowflakes,
Kilns,
Carousels?”

Only to be resurrected in the homely,
Blue sparks of the rain,
Seeping the torn heart, inebriated bells
Of meteors laden with geodes
That brim with autumnal eyes
Of butterflies

Little antennas
With extinguished hearths
Upon alabaster hills
Where the peasant reaped needles
That sewed our clockwork love
Shut from any kisses,
Caresses,
Waters,
Time,
Beings,
Un-beings,
Ourselves

My Naiad, figurehead of the ship of dreams
Great infinitesimal being
Crowned by a ring of seabirds
Dissolving into a sole dove
Among thorny stars

The sea bleeding into your green eyes
The whole world oxidizing
Everything has roots
Everything is a flower

But you.
Brows: seagulls intoxicated on brine
And the sunny void

A heart like a sky
Where my kisses tinged, candidly as stars
And my eyes became gears,
Axles in the moon’s Dream-clock

The conch unleashes the insidious river of music
“Does love change hips or lips, lands or hands?”

Am I yours, are you mine
Or are we ours;
The womb’s,
The water lily’s,
The wake’s?
(This lingers on cerulean shells)

The moon is a half emptied carton of milk
Medea’s blood capsized like a topaz into the grave
The sky: a carafe of tears cascading
Over spume-laden and radiant orchids

A portmanteau of a quiescent summit
Nefarious, motive shadows
Receding among resounding echoes

Your nocturnal gaze solidifies
The barge of my iron-wrought name
Above the white river’s estuary

And a sonorous hymn of fountains
Pervades the jaded earth, ours to dream over

I. Between dreams and cots
Abstinent from warehouses
In the boudoirs of virgins
And my windowless soul
Love spread itself in garlands of clouds,
Clandestine hazels
Among your laky eyes that
Grasp shadowy minnows,
Moored to the sky of my brow;
Solitude’s pincers
As if drunken bells
Of emancipated doves

A raven exasperating,
A bee among the moon’s stamens,
Whitening your diurnal hills of eulogies

II. I, resurrected like a lighthouse
Doused of hopes
With your subduing prophecy
Of aged mirrors, neon sermons

Nascent swarms of scythes severing me
Into cologne-anchors of snuff-bottles
That, furious waitresses vend to narcissistic queens
And their dead infinities of regattas:
Oars of imperceptible hearts,
Oblivion but riggers in spumy reveries
Rising from a slumber of substance
With a cascade of hope
That snows onto my barren soul

In the form of wheat-ears
Weeping violets
Flasks of sorrows, lesions

III. Death: a kiln of ash, wombs
In streams of Christmas lights
That exonerate my chaste soul
Of inky armoires, milky chrysalises

Among aromas of a lonely
Wharf where the barge of kisses,
Keels of enigmatic mouths,
Within waters of time,
Departs for your isle rooted
In my laughter
That is the offshoot
Of your melancholy

Forged of aloofness,
Upon this carousel-world,
Where our lives infuse tears
As wicks or roads
Of matted, snaky coils,
Ensconcing bread’s
Breasts of chaff

Solitude promulgating:
Guitars of crows
And chords of mourning

The trains are all asleep
In the embittered pine forest
Windows disentangle themselves
From their ashen coats
Boreas assailed in twilight’s grate

The moon extinguishes her cigarette of a still comet
A star descends into the cesspool of anguish, pinot
The night weaves garlands of clouds
Crowning the snowy, implacable hills

All flesh, life is in deep slumber
From the mountain to the lake
All but you, me, us on the vagrant rails

Axles inscrutably spin the sky into a coat of solitude
Gears morph clouds into air-flowers
Are we but butterflies flitting,
In the spring-like smog,
Past the amber-paned sky,
And the tinsel sun?

The train of dreams departs the station of my eyes
And enters your soul
Here melancholy coagulated
In lost keys to April’s coveted light
Lapsed coins to night’s vending machine of dreams:
Water’s smile
The pendant of a bluebell
Autumnal roots

The switchman is a tea-brewer of
Verdant dreams
The absurd world is but a pre-loved kettle
The womb’s water
Kerosene of childhood days
Spray of the tulip-barge approaching the
Peachy horizon
Throbbing sparks as
Rootless,
Flower-intoxicated
Star-burgeoning
Trains
Raining into your
Gaping mouth

Our lips coalescing
Into the sole mass of an
Unopened,
Bullet-riddled
Kiss
And an infinite
Track of laughter