Blue Mountain

Beneath a mountain, immense as it is grayish-blue,
I stare up through eyes worn, coal eyes.
I imagine its cone shape if perhaps I,
coming from breaths called clouds, was an eagle
able to see the full bloom of this my blue mountain.

To this I aspire, the shedding of these crude
eyes, these vessels of myopia through which
the masses trade beauty for madness
--convulsing, exhaling, screaming for dung--and
seeing enough of eternity in trees and boulders,
roses and leaves of grass, I pluck these eyes
from off their Platonic caves and beckon the eagle:
enable me to see the full bloom of this my blue mountain.

The King and Queen of the Week

The week rolls into this, the king of days.

The laborer rules on a Saturday, unmanacled monarch;
the queen by his side ever the charmer.

His word is law after the sweetest of slumbers
of the Friday kind; subjects with tails
hooked to walls.

The royal days deposed, the royal days
enthroned.

When the sun is a Face, it all shall cease.

The Golden Goose

There was a man who found a golden goose
Whose down was no, not yellow, but gold, so
Gold it shone, and she was the man's and his
Alone, or so he thought. But she was loose,
A golden goose, so alone, so without peer,
So loved by the man, but loose. She loved
The hands that eased through her dress. Her
Wings she spread for men holding the staff;
Her man was a cobbler, but he loved her. Once,
The man saw: she, in high spirits, laughing,
Merry in the company of the mayor, his hands
Beneath. The hammer quivered, his eyes weak
Before the flood that swept across cheeks
On fire. On the floor he slumped, emancipation?
Never, for he loved her. Never, will he find
Another. The man and his loose golden goose.

Ravens

Ravens, in a flash they are overhead amidst wing claps.
They are night given flight and the liberty to muffle
The moon's wooing of once-contented eyes.

Perched on a shoulder, the nightbird is a timemachine
With red wine eyes entwined with mine, portals
To worlds that precede the fragments on the marble floor.

Ravens, they sadden the soul with what once gladdened it;
But in the presence of silver doves they fly.

A Scetic Day

Drawing near

                             is me

                 in a room

                                                                    solitary.

The hunger

        is a

                                   whisper

        after the quake

                                                           that came on

                                                                                                    the heels of the wind.

Under a Fern-Type Plant

The sun's photon fingers reach
Through spear leaves striping
Me beneath into alternate
Rows of yellow.

Any more feet further and
The heat makes red, so
Here I stay breathed upon
By my fern-type friend.

To You

To You, emblazoned in the gaze of an impossible sun,
Mirrors fragile in every blade of grass,
Aloft in the flight of a fragrant east wind
That blows through mountains of white and blue.
It's true, in the billows of the foamy sea,
Puppet in obedient dance below moon strings,
In the eyes of the swift eagle, gold and taloned,
Or the elusive hare darting to its holed haven.
And even, when man is born with a heart far
From the desire of sweet river water poured
For them the chosen parched, still to You, it's true,
Is the love softer than a limp rose bowed.

Her Mother Eve

How far she has gone from Eve, and yet
The curdling of her blood is ripe with
The cider of adulterous fruit and windfall
Testimonies. She denies her lineage with
Embroidered pageantry and fluff; underneath,
A dark dank crevice littered with the bones
Of the sons of a clown-faced Adam.
She will forever reach for snakes
Clutching silver spiked apples.

She Walks Off

Games, she plays for keeps.
To maintain her pet shadows,
Her anchors to the past;
Turning ears stripped,
Eyes gouged off and dry,
She walks off, bosom proud.

Who knows if the crisp leaves
From her manicured branches
Shall ever cease their shed;
To find another reason for roots
Stabbing the throbbing earth,
A new child defiled.