Under the spell of January’s idle scythe, we are August’s wild reaping

We are the plucked sloe spilling sharp across the curl of ripened tongue

We are lit torches of fermented wormwood searing rain drenched lips

Our smoke is a wreathe of night-blooming cereus draping the waxing crescent

We summon the stars as silent witness, arriving at midnight, dressed as myth

We ring the fire with fingers tangled like garden pickets laced in clematis 

We gather our mouths, throats swept of thistle and thorn

And dare speak to the gods

and the gods, with reverence, dare speak back

#t.david.lauber

Lungs cut from leather  this was the man with the Maltese Cross’ed back I inherit eyes veneered with ash and ember I held hands embossed with blood and cinder  My cross’ed back, my eyes, my hands forged from his iron And my arms, a duet of coils, sprung  the arcing axe, so imperfect, swung Wherever I spit soot as smoke pillars rise He stands as a silhouette against blackened wood and burnt canvas skies

"..Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all"*

It begins, as things occasionally begin

I. You are pursuing a black haired woman

II. She is last seen emerging from the rumbling underground sometime after midnight. So you run down fist clenched avenues, stormtrooping sleepless doorways and dragging the empty reservoirs of sunken window wells

III. You chase through ill lit alleyways under wind chimed fire escapes. You run until you are lost. Until she is lost. Until all is lost. The endless hammering of the throng snaps the bones of your will.

It begins to end, as things rarely begin to end

IV. With a glimpse of a black haired woman through a distorted rivulet of a steam painted window.

V. With recognizing twin crescents of scapulae cleaved by undone strands of a raven.

VI. On a wooden crate with an old man reading secret society poetry winnowed from uncommon tongues. The weep of uhms and uhs rinse bar glass as candelabra flames snuff. Applause is the slap of trained beluga tails performing in aquaria.

VII. With you asking her to dance. Your words fall as meat scraps in a slaughterhouse library.

It ends, as all things

VIII. In the cursive blackness of her balsamic eyes. As torpid as the scattered embers of an abandoned beach fire

IX. She is last seen as the stutter of 8mm film through a swinging kitchen door

X. Existence is liquid

It occurs to you that this is a dream and you wake lonelier than you thought humanly possible.

*title quoted from Emily Dickinson

She is the West

I cross her smooth belly of twilight sage and shadeless mesa

through the unfurled ribbon of her shimmer

She’s my mirage, my mystic, my magnet, my muse

She bears a gospel of crosses driven through summer’s arid shoulders

She will not be muted by the strand of steel wired around the tender camber of her parched throat

She is barbed but boundless

We fuse in the suspended embers of desert ash, and in the ensuing bonfires, the East dies

I bed in the sacrifice of August’s dying river in the mist of dusky pollen in the mantelletta of purple twilight Here In the cloying night breath lie whispers of ripe moths and you, the serpentine milkweed, haunt the curve of eroded cobble I, the unintended Interloper clasp the clumsy fingers of your silken floss you, a sigil carved into the offspring of the moon’s pale corona and I, the chaste curator of your wanton desires still, you will not have me So I sleep swaddled in the cradle of the gloaming longing to break enfevered sleep longing to rip the thread of this virulent dream To finally slip, unseen, from the cryptographer’s curious eye

Melting Point

Cunning is my addiction unraveling  too slow too slow

I keep the periphery keeping I sleep the pale blue sleeping I cannot ebb the flow of scarlet droplets weeping Raping the virgin snow I am melting in degrees  From zero to below