Secrets of the Inner Mind

The Age of Gold cracked me up last night,

asters and sparrows to be exact,

that unrelenting knot in

the choral fire. It’s good exercise, to get out

on stage, to stand in the silvered chamber

and deny emptiness, when the pocket falls so deep

one could mark anything out over the top.

The India ink drops continuously,

its likeness, still Helen as phantom

not the truth of the state of her body

but being awash in a sound uprooted.

The desk is still a symbol I pile things on,

pin down elegies, illegible dates, introductions scrawled

on slender backs of envelopes, receipts, small machine-like

cloud chambers, talon disconnected.

Sunlight burns my feet putting away

the wet mop, where I am stopped

from almost killing myself. All that wobbling of the lens

nonsense, I will cling to the truth of the soundtrack

tearing through the unveiling:

Jeanne Moreau’s scepter coated in dust

a darkness poured from the open door, crowned

enameled teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex

•

Their portrait is crushed

to the point of flowers

Their lines are reaching

arms out from the center

Their lace is torn over

the image at points

a flame-like insistence

flaring this all up from behind

one piss-driven, lifelike icicle

the diamond district through a downpour

past the love-sick dungeons

of Dante, a cleaving after in Sappho,

what remains of a dialogue?

The small, blobbed cellular enclosure

slipping it into strings

letting it wither

•

No god but the act

creator eternally rested

in light

fears for my life

dissolved in the booth

largely unknown

fire exit back/ of the hotel closet door

satin sheets

light foot thunder

lover impaled/ outside of that world

cutting young poets

much slack

and the box for the board

missing:

remains of the maze

spit out from a star