I AM NOT PHONEY

Full of ghosts, I besiege a city of ghosts-

a transcendental epic of timelessness in dissonant intervals.

Listening to the dying echo of our world

is plunging me into abyssal vacantness,

week after week, desolate shore after desolate shore.

Musing over your impregnable helplessness,

I’m left in love with your broken mirror

beside the extinguished fire of our hearth.

HUNG UP ON SOMEONE ELSE

How do I explain a dream?

It’s out-of-placeness and out-of-timeness,

all garnished with familiarity.

It’s frankness and eloquence,

all powered by deception.

Suppose I venture an analysis,

take it apart, break it down, decode it.

It’s still solidities colliding in midair,

and I am striving to take cover

under some conspicuous cloud of consciousness.

What if I get rid of my sense of correctness?

Then at least I travel lighter

and much more impressionable,

which the dream’s mysterious self finds intriguing enough

to lure me

with an even more unexplainable hint of lack of self.

FINE-TUNING

Voyager is inseminating the universe

as I am not being consumed by the fear of death.

In the tiny memory of its mechanical form

takes place a metaphysical transaction

between the improbability of my immortality

and the information of my fertility.

Thus my being alive is transformed

into the promise of an eternal compromise

between a warm machine and a cold depth of space,

leading, perhaps, to a more abstract mortality,

crowned by a touch of a spotless affection

and temporarily transported through the realm

of an almost non-illusory hope.

EYES ON INSTRUMENTS

My consciousness is being vented by your pores,

to be contained by the aspic mould of your carnality,

me being all over you in love, in sheer indulgence.

The way it doesn’t serve me, but is me

is the way your tongue infects my heartbeat,

the way your ear blooms as a crystal clear persuasion.

BODY DOUBLE

Your “life without limits?”

insinuated itself into the metaphor of my impressions,

frisking about in their ambivalence-

a metaphor doubled.

But life’s tenacity emits literal promises,

exact directions

that have to be harvested

as if by a swordplay between musing and insouciance.

The answer that matters is lurking

beneath all aspirations,

hoping to feed once more

on an unabridged perhaps edition of my misdoings.

A PRAYER THING

God within is not more fragile,

although it breathes in sickness;

God within is not less merciful,

although it’s hurt in anonymity.

I touch the wooden frame of my bed,

in amateurish prayer,

in lack of thoroughness,

reaching for safety in unconfessed desperation.

My grasp is empty then and weak,

but full of beloved faces somehow it manages

to sink that inconspicuous solitude of fear

into a vast oneness of relief.

CONFLUENCE

A dead dog on the pavement,

a pigeon sleeping on a sill

inform infinite aspects of life’s mystery,

for in silence they speak,

in defeaning glory,

of the regretless lighting of the wick of meaning

by fear, by beauty,

as if by the firmest hand,

the pair of the trembling one

tenderly outlining the solemnity

of our perpetual defeat

by the unjustifiable working of things.