Commitments and a strict morality
have hurricaned the mind’s most sweeping arc
and left the twisted arts that might have been,
screaming for light in furious, windy dark.
A child’s voice that asks the name of sin;
and older voice that seeks a child’s eye;
hintings of a pure fatality;
these are things for which a man might cry.
Visions habitate the close-held dark,
promising one last fatality,
thrown into a heaven-searing arc,
free of innocence and free of sin,
blessing those still free enough to cry.
What stopped the passage of what might have been?
Seeing once more as by a child’s eye,
commitments and a strict morality.

Somehow, it seems to take a whole lot more
to satisfy me than it did before.

When I realized
my father didn’t have a moustache,
I felt sad.
And when I realized
I didn’t have a father,
I felt like killing the bastard,
all because of a moustache.

Where the moon stands
look for the angry wind
fresh from victory over the fragile sun.
Where the moon stands
look for the blackthorn trees
surrounding the helpless hill.
If traces of the pale-ash moon
survive the wind’s attack,
if silver moonstabs penetrate
the blackthorn wall,
look for a hand’s-breadth of rarity
(Oh once-in-a-lifetime-vision, life, new life!)
and on your palm read mirrored
the world’s destiny and your own.

The unreal pain finds ways to sting
the thing which is not there.
The non-existent footstep rings
on the non-existent stair.
Nature defeats this minor technicality
by birthing minds which also lack reality.

What is it I said
baby bothering you?
Is the greentooth girl come
gobbling your candy
motherhood?
Stares the red-eyed watcher
on your goldenwindowblind
nudity?
Or maybe
the yellow balloon
that broke some twenty years ago
and your heart?
Your first love still remembers
you and I have not forgotten
yet. What more
could you expect?
Baby
what the Hell I said
is it
with you?

Tatters and the naked man beneath
and the grime of the forsaken past
and the keepsake purity of what was future,
more anger than a failure can maintain,
a rigid pride where wisdom would be silent.
This man has seen harsh seasons
yet none so bitter as his shade.
You who find a challenge in each sound,
notice the scars and the shuddering reflex,
consider how he came by his compassion
and wonder that
his touch burns like a brand-iron.
There was a time he moved as an animal
and his will sufficient for his reach.
There was a once he did not feel his skin crawl
at the sight of a suspended moment
or gasp to hear his world
crumble beneath thundering centuries
and hush.
The knowledge of his world as it fell,
it cracked across his mind and who he was.
This man remembers an instant out of time
when he shared
God.

For one to deal in broken imagery,
the objects of another hand and will,
the fabricated births of restlessness,
Oh that is art more brewed with deep regrets
than half-a-hundred lovers’ memories.
Art is both the molding and the breaking,
the turning of corners when the dawn is breaking,
the re-unfragmentation of the soul,
the skill to catch the heart just when it’s breaking.

If you would leap, take care
you do not stumble
over the World
‘s steppingstones.

Bits of time are finite,
countable.
Some people spend their time
counting.