Perpetual majestic,
Or,
Sometimes lambent twilight
Illustrated as a quiet luster
Shared among neighborhood houses
Can fill the senses with
Gratitude esteemed to the
Dependant flux of a
Waning Moon that falls
Lockstep and howling
Among shards of effervescent
Torrents refracted and stretched
Towards black doldrums
Strung across this illusive void.
Insipid protest,
Captivating remorse spilled on concrete.
She didn’t outline her wits
For a droning mass,
Instead harbored them in
The shallow waters she found
Deep down
Where molecular bonds
Shutter and break
With spectral tumult,
And screaming particles
Warily cast sharp shadows
Over the rings of humility
As they rearrange, formless
From integral insight into
The machine they push and pull
Through the fickle years.
She lost a lover once,
Caught herself in the misty
Credulous light breaking
All around her, shattering
Mirrors into splinters that
Were rearranged in a formless blight
She whispers into microphones
Before masses gathered around her,
Elevating,
Pushing and pulling.
A languid derelict sits casting the cobalt shadow of a boulder hanging from a cliff in twilight. Stacks of papers surround him and his whirling typewriter. The room is dark, largely empty except for a small desk behind which the distraught figure does nothing but contrast with the background in a faint bluish gray. From his window, he can see the snow begin to pick up and obscure the landscape. Weather is something he had always felt strangely in tune with, almost forcing himself to recognize even the slightest change in barometric pressure, temperature or humidity and then to construct a reaction accordingly. The temperature gauge outside his window reads 12 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing on the page issuing from his typewriter except a single line that reads “To you, my aphelion,” His eyes follow the browning contours of the stacks of papers that grow from his table and he feels that he had never wrote them, not one word, instead that all those words randomly materialized on paper before him with help from some cosmic order that arranges the nebulae and the stars. Pencils, pens and notebooks litter the floor around him as he sits in stolid stasis of the bustling cosmic order pushing and shoving things slowly into place around him. His mind drifts back to college and the bright idealism he held forth for all to see and hear, his stomach churning in a warm solution of ethics and buoyant youth. They had the means to change the world for the better and it seemed everyone was overflowing with words like “revolution” and “freedom”. Now, after these flashbacks have faded into the distance like a thunderstorm they left behind halitosis and indigestion that could last for hours, days even, without some arbitrary activity taking hold of the foreground to cleanse his pallet. He would take walks, play with his dog, but recently he found these activities left him wanting. A sense of anxious recollection would well up inside him and eventual consume everything before his eyes. His condition made him develop a new habit, something he discovered to be the only thing that offered solace from the blinding acuity holding him hostage. He called his new habit “ran-dying”; it consists of randomly dialing numbers out of the phone book. After teetering on the edge of malicious recall for a few days or so he would flip through the yellow pages and pick a name then call it from an old MA-BELL pay phone he found in a dumpster behind a gas station some years ago that he rigged up to the LAN line in his house. He would pick up the receiver, drop a quarter in and wait for the distinctive click in the dial tone of the phone accepting the quarter in its mechanical innards, then hold the receiver to his ear with his shoulder and flip through the phone book, avoiding the blocks of Smiths and Johnsons until he came to a name with some pep then followed the dots over to the number and dialed it. Should the other end pick up even after not recognizing his number on their caller ID he would start off the conversation with a carefully calculated tone of haste, such as is found in the voice of federal workers who sit in tiny cubicles with attachable ergonomic shoulder rests stuck to the backs of their work phones and who have developed through years of practice a lightning fast dexterity of the fingers when it comes to dialing unfamiliar numbers. So with this tone stitched through his words he would claim to be from the department of so and so, inserting an official sounding accolade in front of the name he made up from jamming together first and/or last names of characters in the broad spectrum of literature he had acquired over his years as a student of English in college and later on as a published writer of fiction. A light headed rush of extreme clarity over takes him as he pieces together his moniker and lets it roll off his tongue thick into the receiver before a faithful reply of acceptance tinged in slight concern comes transpiring back. This must be the sentiment of the jackal, he thinks, as it cackles, peering through the brush at the soggy remains of something that once was alive, but can now only provide sustenance for the living. After the conversation is over he would hang up the receiver and use the screwdriver he attached to the side of the phone via twine and duct tape to pry open the metal seams of the phone and retrieve his quarter unless he felt the conversation truly warranted the payment, in which case he would leave the quarter in the dusty mechanical innards of the phone and sit back down at his little desk between his browning stacks of paper with the contented bliss from his hearty smorgasbord still ringing in his ears.
The blizzard has knocked the phone lines down for an amount of time he doesn’t want to remember. Outside the snow falls in ragged white clumps that streak in a rapid static across the windowpane.Translucent crevice fixed clear
Across this epoch resting in
Ashen wrinkles of deprecation
Hung so hauntingly loose around
Bones of something more.
A white tree grows in Brooklyn,
Yet no one can determine a species
As they walk past in recognition
Of a quibble laid as keystone,
Supporting blind mothers,
False treaties and vomit
Disguised as what might be
Possible in the frosty
Reflections chiseled in
Corneas of skewed reverence.
Paregoric and Phantoms,
Unless the earth swells in a lush brilliance;
It is denied, false prophet tickled with beauty behind a mask of lye.
She carried around a pocketbook with loose change in words of innocence:
The soft rapture spills rust,
Effusive dribble etched in a tombstone.
She died on a Thursday morning
In February with fog in her windowpane
And entrusted her pocketbook to me in words of solicitous intent,
Citing motion and decay,
The Moon and transience,
Poetry and Purpose.
I spent the loose change at a Coke machine.
Something is said to crawl under the skin of select stimulant users,
Something adjunct to the platitude of that transient, metaphysical tonnage
Supplied by Eve’s delicious apple as it falls
From her womb, fecund, imbuing the soil of the Eden we find ourselves in,
Mouth agape,
Silent and lacking something, something,
Something subliminal, visceral,
Lurking overhead like a double consciousness that floats softly
And contains a dismal presence of ourselves,
Insatiable, yet full to the brim of every last moment cast in a black shadow
Of time we can’t believe as truth
To agonize the last waking seconds of something, something,
Something we describe as life,
Or reality in a fish bowl of transparent ether denied to be seen
And wholly realized when it drifts above the mind
We find ourselves occupying in incompetence
Without a song, limerick, or rhyme;
Instead, mouth agape,
Screaming an abyssal void into an echo
Reverberating through the walls of some fool’s history
Scribbled on a wall of limestone and seashells
To be packaged in tiny capsules of cellulose and crime.
Wall-eyed and hollow,
A concerting clock knocks away
At the ardor of frantic babble
As it foams on the surface
Obscuring the moonlight
That slithers like splintering
Serpents of white electricity.
The depths bellow blink with
The ephemeral eyes that
Christ wears on the cross
Exacting the treatment necessary
Of suspending an effusive
Frown on a wire as ravenous anger
Separates flesh from the sacred.
An apparition of a dank
Sepulcher; corpses rotting
With mortal smiles spread over
Faces as fragile as morning frost.
Rats mingle and grow fat
Talking of the crusades, Nero
And the unattainable, all the while
Probing, dumbfounded and happy
As the walls are wrought with seed
And undulate following the
Whims of the sages that stare
Wall-eyed and hollow
At their creation through every
Crest and trough, mutating at
The rate of infinite that hangs
In the sky like a behemoth
With tendrils descending
To lick the monoliths of
Man as serpents of white electricity.
