Sacrament

Insomnia & I have rekindled our on-again, off-again relationship & I've spent most of the dark of the last two nights letting cochleae drown in a flood of notes, staring at strikingly reproduced images of this, realizing how cliché & sentimental it sounds & not giving one atom of damn, which is probably why I'm oh-for-six

"Seven."

oh-for-seven in submissions but one has to write what hits them in the gut & draws blood. Metaphorically, of course, I'd hate to get that on this generically suburban beige carpet, right next to the still-wet tea, knocked over by a furiously clumsy pen stroke that simply doesn't have it inside to shock & frighten, save with the 19th generation copy he passes off as worthwhile verse* to jaded postmoderns looking for a Valian edge.

*Hey, it was penned at 2-something & it's still better than Brazilian PK takers.

A pre-dawn walk to clear the head often does nothing of the sort, for, in avoiding stepping on an interestingly speckled beetle, I realized I hadn't brought my camera & being not even an amateur entomologist, such a visual prize is forever consigned to the wastes of memory, though likely to never reach the status of madeleine. Sorry, bug, even if you crawl as low as we seem to, you're never going to be as poetic as the stained glass we strain to see, to vanish in, if only for a moment that we hope to cruelly lock away in a few lines, bringing satisfaction to the gaoler, the prisoner, one in the same.


I'm king of the dead more than Rokitansky ever was.
What's a cadaverous array
that answers to chirurgical beckonings, calls?
What but throwaway wind-up toys
that once played at dream, nerve
springing on sloppily-timed zinc coffins
hauling prime lurch twice a day.
The glass rests, too, belts lunettes of sweat
& waiting while I wait for a mushroom cloud
of etch & blue. Clarke works
in mysterious ways;
in Dublin, in a book
of his work at which I stare, blushing, too broke
to buy, breaking copyright –
I wished, wish & will to abjure fascination. No, I don’t, though
it's still okay to write that, right? Pieces,
how they're moonlit, how shattered by quiet,
soon kaleidoscoping into sharp friezes.
Better to play numb than freeze a cherry color –

if I could be that careful. What if
I pretend merry artifice is golden-age noir,
chloroform shy charm shut.
What if I staple the aorta shut – now
that would be quite the denouement,
if a bit crass. Slasher flick ritual,
neon take on vintage slow burn,
is that worse? I don't know
& shouldn't bother with such noisy splatter,
with such arterial excess,
preparing this comfortable playing numb for the kiln.
Up on panels of acid silence
bordered on all limbs by a poison hidden
below feathered fronds, organs of creative peace trill
vermilion & souvenir involontaire to run
away. To my beloved archetype
that imaginary flight is cut, fired.
The ring & the pages, a dashing afterimage
stains a dying eve with two more corpses.