Where Seraphs Sleep
There lies a place,
Weathered buttress,
Crag stone face,
That betrays her crumbled spoils
With velvet feather flair
Of once opulent grace,
Now evaporated air,
As vernal tidings
Give marigold kisses
Upon the crater scars
Of this ancient space,
While minutes walk
A carefree pace.
There lies a field
To which time yields,
Her waking dreams
And die cast will,
Through budding trees
And hand clap leaves,
Applauding hope
In emerald green.
Her leaves breathe peace,
Where seraphs sleep.
And Zion’s stars
Cast glittering chariots
Burning firefly gold,
Cloaked in tormentil sun,
Neon lemon bold.
From flesh to dust
With wolf leer lust,
Death pines for life,
His nightshade creep
Of eternal sleep,
Coiling serpentine dungeons
Fang dagger deep.
And my halo is nailed
To shipwrecked sails,
Though I’ve reaped the bones,
Of bygone tales,
Of courses charted
Through heaven and hell,
And suffered long
Death’s siren spell.
Yet we will tread
Those fated steps,
Up stairwell skies,
Where devils crept,
Towards Shekhinah glories,
Through sun capped flowers,
As death surrenders,
Its raven hour,
Where seraphs sleep.
Farewell To Funerals
Farewell to funerals
The bitter respite,
And evaporating port,
Bearded with glum mists
That blur mortal lines
And tarry long to sigh,
Before the dizzying spires we climb
Lead to the tolling bells
With brusque finality,
As death is left pouting behind,
Between Jacob’s abiding ladder
And the windup clocks of time.
Facsimile caskets,
Like dominoes fall,
A checkered melee,
Echoing through celestine halls.
Golden years folded,
A house of cards strong,
But in these faded frontiers,
Where has dawn gone?
In dusk’s jaded contours,
Where night smothers
The sun.
Bruised heaven’s guitars
Roar in gothic harmony,
The triumphal charge
Stalking to besiege
With spirited aim,
Dusty trapdoor ears,
That gnaw through spirit and bone,
To memory’s vapours and tears,
Sunken like stone.
O sacred whispers of God,
Beg your sovereign ear to the sound,
Of wild glorious nothing,
Just laying around.
And my farewell friend,
May you waltz in permanent fantasia,
Bathed in youth’s begotten fire,
And forever may you fly,
Yet never grow tired.
So farewell and goodnight,
To sweetly hallowed ends,
Where light
Swallows darkness,
Forever,
Amen.
Cancer
I see you as a boxcar hobo,
Faded fable, rugged rambler,
Ramparts raging,
Punched up coward,
Swollen hubris,
Dulled knife at the ready
With powered down plasticine stride,
Oblivion’s derailed train
A slow motion suicide
Like molasses kisses,
And thorny embrace,
Wearing a mask,
Of flesh burned away.
I see you scaling Roman walls,
Web footed spidery crawl,
Malice trapped
In your raven cloaked breast,
Buttons of tumours
At the ready to burst.
And I see you,
No name nothing,
Treading a supercilious line
With wrangling hands,
And an adder’s appetite
Hospice hopping,
Surgical window shopping,
Cancer,
Yes I know you all too clear,
For your sulfur weighs down air.
Cancer,
You came to poison the well,
Where imbued mercies
Linger on at healing lengths,
And you only came
To strangle trembling songs,
O black eyed Chimera,
Sizing up your laser focused lot,
Heartily pouncing
On the lame legged gazelles,
Razor wire paws roped
And tethered tragic traction
Like a furious miracle.
Cancer,
Furious with saber toothed shake,
A cold cavern
Of charcoal teeth
Collapsing on itself
With predatory push and pull
To drag the innocents into
Your layered spectrums
Of cracked bulb flickering
Soul broke loss
Rock steady griefs
And a thousand sobs
In your flatline endgame.
Cancer.
You incredulous bastard.
Satan’s plastic tiara,
Atop your syringe horned head,
Dazzled by your own conceit,
Molded mouth
Of the tasteless
And the truculent,
Laid up siege
With readied forces
To sickle God’s flowers
And pillage
His Gold threaded sheaves,
With your wild wraith massacre,
Malicious permutations,
Dividing your spoils
For the great devouring party
With funeral black balloons
Treading glum air
And rising to flame licked ceilings
In your banquet hall
Of fools and saints.
Cancer.
You incredulous bastard.
But I rose today,
From a wide awake coma,
To execute
Your hatched miseries
And microcosm anarchies.
No last rites.
No dove wing covering.
Not a lone molecule of mercy.
Cancer,
Spitfire viper,
Urchin of mankind,
A free form Goliath,
And I plunge into the cold void
Of your sackcloth night,
For I’m not going down,
Without a fight.
Hallelujahs
Clutter God’s skies,
As I swallow your evil
In one cherub sized bite,
And you are felled,
Grown limp,
Disgusting,
A flatlined rogue doctor,
A farewell parade
For dagger eyed victors,
Watching you tumble
Down the black rainbow mountain
Under everlasting scalpel sky,
Splitting your teeth
And hollow bones,
That kill your curse
And worse,
Your pride.
You know,
It really is wonderful,
To watch you try to fly,
As my once clipped wings now soar,
While yours just wither and die.
Cancer,
Evaporation
Of the eternally irrelevant,
Altogether undone,
Your paper bullets
Next to a paper gun.
Lazarus vs. the “Big c”,
It is your last call to oblivion
For all stewards of hell
Caught
And eradicated,
Slink then sink,
Where the slough’s lone token,
Is your jester head on a stick,
Made of the Cross,
Because you neglected to see,
In your madcap avarice to feed,
That your power was never greater than love,
Nor the tombstone ache of grief.
The Girl With The Plastic Flowers
Reposed on top shelf walls,
The mute and starry eyed orphans
Parade their affected wares
With sulking optimism
And foolhardy charade,
To the tuxedoed platoon of the kingly elect
As the fever hot breath of July’s damnation
Cradles the catatonic herd
With animatronic embrace,
Where the spoiled flesh
And desolate machines are shill bedfellows
Betwixt the dividing lights,
For cruelty has been made queen bee
In their crumbled hive,
Where the honey is boiled
While the bees are yet alive.
And the moon is a punch drunken derelict
That festoons her cigar box bed with stingy haunt,
As snub gun noses press smoke signal sighs
That lend a smudge of fog
To lonely aged windows,
And the audacious hope and illusionary snares
In this chamber of youth mirage
Return a spectral projection
Of shell shocked stares
And eternal reflection,
With mirror eyes that bear witness to a panoramic visage of burdens,
Yet cannot wipe away a soul dribbled tear.
She sits on broken glass and holds plastic flowers,
Ready for her quaking applause and a prodigal’s party,
One ripe with white noise symphonies
And blood red balloons,
Begging strains of rhapsodic ear worms to lay their eggs
In the trembling and tentative chapters
Of her dust mound heart,
But nobody picks her number today,
And her song is yet unsung
As naive melody sinks meek into a silent grave
And the lottery of the rejected,
Shuffle back to steel caged skies
With tomorrow a teasing ghost
Of salvation or Judas.
She leaves her plastic flowers on the windowsill
And her bed is sonoran drywall
Outfitted as a coffin of cheap surrender
Waiting for oblivion
Or heaven’s everlasting arms;
And she knows that God is not helpless,
And she knows that God is not cruel,
And the ebony mares of midnight,
Gallop straight for the sun soaked trough of noon,
And the girl with the plastic flowers
Will wake up very soon,
And may today she be gifted a sunrise,
That finally wills her flowers to bloom.
Bittersweet Nothing
Incubation tomb,
Wormhole to the womb,
Out into the skewed scatter
Of a million unknown days,
And spat out like Jonah
From soporific embryonic seas
That once lulled me into a slipstream sleep,
That entrenched its world,
Fathoms deep.
My febrile seedlings are rage ready for feeding
And I am now the starring role
In now here nowhere.
Day one.
They crudely clamp my cherry flesh
With feral precision,
And the mothership of mother
Lays unaware in her morphine drip cocoon,
Now but a rag doll frame
Of cracked and poked contour clay
And a jumbled jungle of sinewy limbs
Hung up into a submissive V,
While the defiant airs of the doctors
Cloud good will
With cloying empty gestures
That sickens God Himself.
And maybe my pinpoint eyes
Saw the monster behind the curtain
And wanted to scramble back
Into Eden’s haven,
But mother lays near death
With her veins a bullet train wreck
Of razor ribbon origami nightmares
As the overlapping overload
And analog readouts
Scream haunted transmissions
Of bad tidings
And numerical harum scarum.
The nurses are angels
Bathed in day glow white,
And dance with tribal drumfire,
While the rattle of my tinny roar
Is but a most lonesome whimpering bid
To return to God
That pulses through glass
And weakly shakes the earth
With its feeble revolution
And murmuring protest.
I am now a flightless bird
That only knows,
That the humming artificial sun
On the chalk white ceiling
Can never warm my numb bones
Nor settle the collapsed composition
Of afterbirth aftershocks,
And the fragmented grunt
Becomes undone;
And all of this,
On just day one.
I already know this place is dead.
Mother’s bed was hallowed
And God spoke like muffled thunder
Through the pale pink walls.
I cry.
My cup of tears runneth over.
I am coma eyed with silver slash vision.
I am undreamed dreams that I dreamt I dreamed.
I am welcomed to the dark ironies
And colliding planes
Of moon and sky and sun.
It is day one.
My cup of tears runneth over.
God,
Hold my hand,
As we walk through this wonderful wasteland,
Of bittersweet nothing.
O Violet Bird
O Violet bird that spies on me
In truculent secrecy
Your stillness cloaks
The hemlock tree
And haunts the birch
And bitter bee.
Movement of order
You wrangle free
God’s Hands of fire
That fashioned thee.
Blurred velvet wings
Like origami flowers
You stalk rooftops
With headstrong power.
Cityscape hewn
Dirty fabric
Azure sky
As your perched surveillance
Takes on mechanical might.
You’re pretty cute
For such a little spy.
A diadem star
Meets diadem eye
Tempering light
Eclipsed as you fly.
You’re pretty cute
For such a little spy.
Treading your wares
In feathery glares
To all of your soldiers
Now rushing by.
Godspeed little friend
In your boundless above
And carry your cheer
And do it with love.
Autumnal Psalm
Cerise stained orchards,
Wrestle Mother Earth,
Beneath the kiss
Of the stirring sun,
While nebulous clouds,
Headstrong and proud,
Take rocketing flight
In slow parade
Of their fanciful forms.
The wind whispers
Baby’s breath,
As marigold crowns
Touch bygone spirits
Of daydreaming derelicts,
Afoot their idle paths
To denizen pathways
And promenade illusions.
God’s bloodflowers
Bid farewell,
With poignant nods
Of weathered defeat,
To the enveloping shape
Of autumn’s drapery.
Here’s to the crimson
And yellow cavalry,
For her pride
Is soon to sweep,
Swallowing the amber fields
With limping stride,
As days fall by.
Autumn’s sickle
Makes her cryptic rounds,
With fevered hot
And indiscriminate lust,
For in this battling
Sea change heart,
Does autumn in summer,
Duly trust.
Behold her weary
Reluctant sigh,
As her valley of tears
Resigns her crown.
Summer now,
Has tempered calm
And lays the mantle
Of her majesty down.
Rose red rush
And ruby lips
Have marked
Her gold terrain,
Where scarlet weeps
And willows sleep,
To lulling melodies
Lost at sea.
Like a solitary soldier,
Crestfallen, ragged and worn,
The mantle steadies
Changing hands,
For such is nature’s
Time worn power,
in such a giving
And yielded hour.
The last of September’s
Hint of flowers,
Float forms
In a tragic dance,
Of ramshackle shuffle,
As God treads
His Holy feet with due grace.
Behold the changing of the guard!
Behold the fury
Of nature’s sword,
And that which befalls
Her fragile
And unshuffled
House of cards.
It is you to me
And they to thee,
As songs of color
Are now set free.
For autumn has displaced
Her taciturn shield,
Emerging spritely
With irresistible grace
And eternal embrace.
Behold, again,
Her weary sigh,
As she resigns to the earth,
Her golden crown.
Summer is peace,
If not cradling ease,
As she lays
Her sunny head down.
O autumn!
O leaves!
O Maldives!
O Greece!
Your golden kingdoms forever remain.
But pain is the course,
For the seasonal horse,
That gallops
Then turns away.
Pub Questions For God
I’ve oft wondered in the clam pockets
And dingy dungeons of sleepless sleep,
If paradise is simply an inverted dream,
Spun wild from gold
Now wintered, spent, ingloriously old,
Stranded in quarters reserved to gally
Our spider sly upwards tremble of a crawl
Towards the waking and winking stars,
Where truth condemns her knowing to obfuscated riddles,
That God never intended to give ear to?
The hobbling old man raises a grail to desert lips,
And drinks up to long ago sailed away ghosts,
That parted through time’s
Charmed enigmatic mists,
Only to sink
And never to float.
And he sings off key like a paranoid ambulance scream,
Breathless chaser after chaser,
In between melodic snatches of amnesiac songs,
Sourced from a creaky film reel mind
Feebly roaring through its tentative loop with furious steam,
That always slithers a simmering glimmer
Of head scratching cosmogonal showers,
As his lost echo pulses, dies down and bleeds,
While he hunts through the unearthed glow
Of a dream’s stubborn playful light
Now dug up from a fog shrouded brain,
As it warps, darts and weaves,
Through bent projections,
And dead transmissions
From unswept nebula’s torchlight gleam,
As he asks aloud to God with blithe uncertainty;
“Perhaps paradise is an undreamed dream,
That never was,
Or was it
A dream undreamed,
That bulwarked her beauties
In tedium’s sobered dried eyes,
Where the start of our dreams
Begin at the end of our lives?”
And he drowns deep in scotch,
And whistles a tune,
That charges the air
With hope and with ruin.
And everyone stares
As if this were true;
For if life is a lie,
Then are we one too?
Oliver And Penny
Oliver and Penny,
Canine twins of copper fur,
Ornamented coat that in patches peeks through,
The paint of ebony’s zagging stripes
In checkered accord,
The regal dress and explosion of fleece,
Leaving sloppy traces for us to follow
Towards the fate of chewed up slippers
And mangled tuna fish cans,
As the guilty little bandits make a madcap scramble
And whisking getaway
To a sanctuary of bedspread.
Oliver and Penny,
Sniff out invisible prey,
Entranced into motion
Of blood sport allure
And wolf savage game
That ends up
With a ticker tape blast
And frisky display,
Of fang punctured toilet paper confetti,
As the guilty little scrappers,
With accidental humor, slink away,
Paws a comic hop.
Plum tongues,
Snub gun noses
Ivory teeth
Alabaster scissors
Rip-roaring ferity,
These wild eyed imps at play
In the living room bushlands,
The thunder of their tussle
A house cat deterrent,
Sonorous barks
Jailing up the darting tomcat,
In roundabout impasse.
I’ve settled the case,
That dogs are really
Cherubic souls
Dressed up
By God
In shaggy play clothes,
Legs as readied rockets,
Their music
A sonic boom tumble
Mere mischief
And wrestling blur,
Then a brief ceasefire for laps of toilet water.
Oliver and Penny
Through thick and through thin,
Are dutiful comfort,
Wearing love’s skin.
So suffer their bounty of kisses
As but a mountain of gain.
For these dutiful pilgrims,
Lay their drowsy little heads
In the laps of treasured few
And know the kindest of hearts
By scent
And by name.
The Seafaring King
Of blunt savagery,
Does the blister lipped captain
Ready an emery throated appeal,
To God in His abiding gold encircled sphere,
That He may dial down
The kaleidoscopic rays,
And the flame licking fury
Of the punishing sun.
For the jagged shoreline haunts
With hallucinatory menace,
The quaking wooden ship
Whose crazed carriage
Weaves a desperate throttling fit
Of sporadic pitch,
Into the heart of brackish tempest
Below night’s ether
And fathoms of inky abyss.
The ship pirated of mercy
Cuts through deathly spell,
While the sea’s murmured mockery,
Laughs a dark riot,
With rattling verve
And fevered fuss,
As Poseidon’s shabby plaything,
Ensnared to liquid tumult,
Becomes a cornered desperado.
The bleary eyed captain
Skin swollen to gaudy rose,
Takes wavering sight
Through dim taint of saltwater,
And faintly spies,
A flickering lighthouse,
Eremitic temptress,
Oceanic illuminant,
Hope’s frail seduction,
Across the murky leagues,
Beyond the taunting depths.
This crag clutched sea finger,
Weak light a loop of dull fire,
Stands dressed in her ancient stripes,
Weathered and tressed
In a blister of gulfweed tangle,
This faithful mariner’s torch.
Now livens the captain’s charge
To posit the bow
Towards this delirious course,
The death rattle groan
Of the splintering ship,
Deaf to the ears
Of the seafaring king.
And with frenzied prune hands,
The captain steers
Fate’s whining wheel
In monomaniac vim,
Eying the suffered misty horizon,
And the captain remains,
As fixedly staunch
As great Ahab himself,
Until the terrible ruse,
Of the wreck does him in.
Now there are those,
Who tell their tales
Worn down with age
And besieged of sentiment,
But still yet a few,
Crowned with cloud hoary heads,
Will still dare to speak
Of that daring great ship,
Romanced in the crosshairs
Of delirium’s dream,
That was dashed into dust,
At the saltwater feet,
Of the mighty and unforgiving,
Siren of deep.