Apprenticeship

... between impulses and repentances,
between advances and retreats.
—Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?

Here I am

posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets

sonnets as rare

as a live Aegean rhino

absorbing the cracklings of my craft

its riverine volcanoes

its spectacular lightning peninsulas

emitting plentiful creosote phantoms

from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas

scouring through years of unrecognized pablums

of constant arch-rivalry with extinction

bringing up skulls of intensive discourse

by the claws in one’s mind

which seem to burn with systemic reduction

one then suffers poetic scorching by debris

by inaugural timber which flashes

by friction which flares up & harries

by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass

of initial intuitive neglect

as if one’s fangs

were fatally stifled by incipience

by verbal range war didactics

by territorial driftwood

by sudden undemonstrative detractions

awed

by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante

one’s youngish body stands

devoured by reverential print trails

momentarily cancelled

by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval

stung

by demeaning neutralities

ravaged

by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis

by a tasteless collision of rums in transition

by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris

as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees

there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche

with indeterminate earthenware splinters

taking up

from aboriginal density

a forge of Sumerian verbal signs

cooked with a tendency

towards starfish hypnosis

towards psychic confrontational drainage

conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire

yes

apprenticeship

means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic

cringed in smoky interior cubicles

releasing various deleriums

as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star

with its dark incapable tints

with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna

poetics

an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies

stretching under a blue marsupial sun

like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed

fugaciously transfixed

upon an anomalous totem of glints

upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions

above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise

of course

kinetic

like magical malachite rivers

flowing from moons

blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas

I’ve looked

for only the tonalities that scorch

which bring to my lips wave after wave

of sensitivity by virulence

yes

a merciless bitterness

brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs

in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter

in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage

like a scattered igneous wind

co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath

resolved by flash point edicts

by consumptive stellar limes

by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue

mixing magnets

juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities

cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas

yes

hatcheries

floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint

to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette

its mysteriums

always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas

or leaking moon spun alloestrophas*

as if speaking

in irregular glossological green Dutch

a frenetic seminar on febricity

a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging

a ferocious vacillation

explosive as random “aggregational” nodes

mimed by a black consonantal dissection

its maximal priority

forked at “hypotactic inclusion”

with isochronous internal procedure

with ratios

with phonic penetralia by distortion

primed by anomalous “nuclear accent”

by a cadence composing syllables & compounds

yes

poetics

its force

jettisoned by “hypotaxis”

by ... paratactic co-ordination

& fire

Notes:

alloestrophas: coined from the word “Alloestropha.” A term used by Milton in the Preface to Samson Agonistes to describe verse composed in stanza (or strophes) of irregular length and construction.

Source: The Stratospheric Canticles (Pantograph Press, 1995)