Something Like Cimmerian Darkness


You plead me give you
the membrane,
and are surprised at our
fleshless, orgiastic
communion.

We are bathing in muddy rivers
which run upstream.

Do you dare change yourself
into a molting form?
Will you reply to the wind of
otherways?
It calls you to feed on your own
threshold heart.

To answer is perilous.

Come! Make love to your
dark creature self, caress
the inner salt and kiss
your coiled deceiver .

Embrace it all!

In changing day to night
In living counterclockwise
In stepping through the mirror
In changing night to day

You have set fire to your
self-constructed soul
and nothing in you will abide
this brute ladder of longing.

You are an inherited abomination
and too intoxicated to look away.

You plead me tear away
the membrane,
and are dismayed at our
individuated, simplistic
postmortem.

Antidote

Antidote

Water snake, you slide between my thighs
and the driftwood fork of you
beds splinters in my flesh;
there is no recourse to this action.

I trace the pattern of these dead things,
pleasant punctures of serpentine grace,
sharp arrows of self-righteousness.
Quilled, I slip down, spine to stone,
send my hands trailing
liquid fingers to the riverside.

All winter you slept under me,
coiling, uncoiling,
torpor ridden and ice burning.
When the green shoots split your sides
you woke hungry for the river,
and twisting out, thread your sinew
through the stones.

Water snake, you sprout legs,
slowly they emerge,
unfolding like waking spiders;
each a jointed complaint to your belly,
and you scuttle sideways
rolling hardboiled eyes
at the drowning moon.

I, touching the current,
take up the water line,
gather it to my breast and swallow
this hot pebble left on my tongue.
I watch you flounder in the rippling;
spider twigs scrabbling against
the red scales of your demise.

Under patient moon, I pull out
each peculiar fragment;
plant them on the shore where they bud
their own skitterish legs
and weep themselves
into the mossy night.

I touch my fingertips to these
raised welts on my thighs,
perfect points of release,
and cover them in spruce pitch and ashes.
This life blood smoldering,
I exhale, and cup the open sky.

Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise

There is gunfire
       in the garden;
             a single shot
                   ringing out
                         to mark the passage

of some delicate temptation.

There is gunfire
       in the garden;
             and he licks the salt
                   from lips wrapped

tightly about the barrel.

There is gunfire
       in the garden;
             tart splattering passion,

two unclothed and innocent.

There is gunfire
       in the garden;
             one walking away
                   covered in satisfaction

considering himself             God.

The Despair

The Despair

Here, at the meeting of land and sea,
I find nothing new washed ashore.
I pick my way on the long stretch of stones
walking in solitude, salt stinging my lips
cracked by the wind’s relentless beating.

Is it time to wade into you,
sea that temps me with such sorrowed sigh?
You longingly touch my feet leaving
damp kisses of afflicted charm.
You bestow these like untouched hosts.

The shore stretches, widens,
it beckons my brooding mind to follow,
further still, far, far, I wander,
with shadowed gulls trailing, watching.
Calling out with mottled stillness, they deride my soul.

The sun filters cold, yellow and contemptuous,
through twisted, storm cowed trees.
It brings my eyes to tears, the salt of my body
departing, like questions remaining unanswered,
and falling, to be diluted by the rising tide.

I am flung back from contemplative reason
by the pricking sleet racing needles across the water.
It hits my skin with pointed precision, and pain,
that is mortal and fleeting, washes through me.
My feet are deep in sand as I watch the sea roll in.

I see the spit reaching out to the blurred horizon,
and there, a figure, mad, wind whipped and racing
stops to turn and reach for me with spider fingers.
A moment of fluid compulsion drenches the air,
the half-dead embrace of chilled need shudders about me.

My hands reach back to meet this despair,
and the frozen rain shreds the flesh from bone as I watch,
transfixed by the undoing of corporeal illusion.
To tendon, to bone, to dust and release.
What holds me together now? Desire, passion, fear.

I bleed promises on the shore,
till the sea rises with crimson lips
and kisses my spirit with terrible pleasure.