250. In the Updraft of My Shoulders

I, for the first part:

windbreak and breached along the circumference of a line

an instrument of the word and instrumental in its demise
I am, at long last, impetuous and given over to self-doubt

modulated, labored (as breathing or birth), and resonant
blanched and almonds for the shape of the eyes upon me
numb and mumbling into humbling sleep and slouching

touching lightning to leave the greatest shadows behind
disheveled, splintered, withered in even the thought of it
wedged into and threaded through so deep I cannot move
tilt toward wilting hills until the rest can be undreamed

what it is that dissolves and darkens into fertile decay
dense but endowed with an enervating lexical sense
residue of definition upon me that I could not wash off
between the least usurpation and the greatest acquiescence
tenderly, with obfuscated silence and intended unravelings


II, for the two of me:

luminous with encrustations of glittering veils and a beach laid out

stabbed and shattered, I am inhuman enough to forget the reason
damp with songbirds, and inaccessible to subliminal substance

segments of scripts and fictions that must be thrashed or wreathed
distinct from cognition, the pollinated blossom, whose pollen is I
in the indeterminate midst, and immense, soft mist through the reeds

I am warped from white and wisteria, all that’s wrapped in weeping
the tapestry of raspberry across the arm in blades of intricate absence
thrust and must, tattered from the momentary, luxurious, hunched
slipped and muscled under encrypted twisting, slipping swiftness

straddled in a muddled way, absent measured attribution or scribbling
extricable but ballasted, viscous, and totally heartless in its own way
as I dwell within the jarring flame of field and furrows set for morning
olate, makeshift, unctured, fibrous, as if gauze has sprouted her wounds
moon’s message comes sterile but meaningful for we cannot linger there


III, for the meeting of moods:

rhythmic rides inscribed upon the skin imprinted with the forms of flaying

erratic aggregates, clusters of ducks hurled after pearls and peals
the needlessnesses of my heart riddled after itself and hollow quaking

rooted in the thistles charred from fires made of thistless whistlings
clotted panic, the way they scattered as if meaning for destruction
pleated cadence, how my wrist went into whispers of blood and perishings

alphabets pillaged for a poem and worshiped only for their nakedness
the structure of humming, immaculate in its back-glancing perditions
imbued with bullience and planks of evening air out through my heart
taut right angles of illegible fragrances, vaporous and pouring onto us

stripped and scrapped and pressured into wasted carbuncular lights
folded into muscles of depleted gulfing before incommensurabilities
I stood, exhausted and rippling with heat, in the atmospheric void
pillow for the teeth, and the florescent light of the garden woke me
sometimes weightlessly in waves, sometimes released against giant oaks


IV, for the fortunate:

either relenting or glistening, he could not extend to that slender point

facets of canceled stamps, and the syllables of straw swarming around us
quilted light and the reason I gave to loosen these sudden pigments into flight

cerulean reaches, past arborescent levitations, in ribbons of narrow sorrows
the pulping of every word displaced but in continuous impressions of death
my rafters crumpled into throes of mirrors milking eyes for desperate sight

articulate tracery lost and wrought upon the field of finding the way
embroidered voices, but pronged for fighting, clatter, suspended in breath
I stutter at the edge of dream spooling off into reverberating blackness
proffered woodlands without rungs, or feet for running upon them

canonical signatures gone into remission and buoyed by brasive skeins
plump, pendulous putrescence of a rococo deity forgotten except for tokens
unremitting grammar gleans consummate memories from dispersion
my knotted musculature is what sworn oaths obliterated in the aftermath
glowed as a swelling unsheathed, yet enough for comparable differentiations


V, for the season of flying:

hallucinatory now and the cloud of sleep darkens into cystic versions of me

creasing the sound into folds of my fingers, florid and retreating from the caves
rendered gutted, sotted, humpbacked, stuccoed, and in golden sycamore light

stratified, but calcified into vestiges that reminded them of eloquence
the calligraphy of blossoms, the scribbles of seeds so that so many were born
mistakable indentations in my own skin, unrecognized except as skin

cupped in the process of recuperation, I left sleeping for the deaf or bereft
the flection equivalent to shadow fanning out into the spectacle of speaking
unconstellated, imperceptible, amoral, illogical, decrepit, and brushed off
ephemeral bundles of existence is all we could stitch with a hummingbird

a sequence of ellipses in the frequency of fractures or even thinner than that
we are burnt but verdurous, written as if infused with moons and mirrors
troughs vested with slender threaded rhythms and wefts toward echo
contrapuntal motions against the concupiscent mouths we give each other
shh, it is but ash, and shudders, transitive, ponderous, and mute