An Insomniac’s Hymn to the Old Moon

Why does one need sleep  

Where the languid nightmares creep  

Lurid and darling with twilight and starlings,  

The midnight hour weeps.

Dead and heavy, weary beyond years.  

My velvet brain was out to dry  

Unraveling to silk tears—  

Yet the sun is honey, drips  

Up its yolk  

Through your lead reflection,  

Through rivers, eclipsed.

Shining bright above my head  

Take the nighttime terrors in my stead  

Lurid and darling with twilight and starlings,  

The midnight hour weeps  

Lurid and darling with twilight and starlings,  

The midnight hour weeps.  

Mater Matuta

Shimmering sea meets twinkling sky  

as tangerine wanes with dying pyre.

Sailboats pass, seagulls fly,  

and soon ripe figs blend with the sky.  

Travelling Byronic Seagull

translated from a yellow-legged gull’s keow call

“The rhapsody of ardor's fate  

now wanes and dims for me;  

upon my wing I wear my heart,

for love it does not beat.

“So is my fate as the bird of the bay

Where merchants arrive to raise prices high;

Though stealing their roast beef is perfect to me,

I long to contend with each lost soul I see.  

“For when love is sighing like the dying shores  

and castaways find their homes,  

I can’t help but think of the ship that sinks  

and the sailor’s shanty of mourning.”  

Axe and Axis  

plural wordplay

 When axes on their axes duel, they forge a cleated wheel  

Half dissuades the masses, this cold front of burning steel—  

Though on the chain no more remains degrees of separation,  

Our notion of utopia’s an act of un-creation.

Geometry of A Heel-Sitting Venus de Milo

The dip that forms when she lays down to the side

Segues into a subtle slump, parallel to

The same curve that augments her sturdy legs.

All the beauty of the world explained in a moment,

The mystery of the parabola

Black and white photography in motion flashing lucky before our eyes before they undercranked into grotesque caricatures

Cyclical Return Home After Exile

because time changes the brain like the seasons change a forest

He was a stranger, a traveler who, like Odysseus, so lost in his own digression that it branched out of the fog. A strange clarity after displacement at the hands of your own loneliness, to wander through curiosity's forests.

Except it was not the way he remembered.

When he returned from sleep's thieving void trunks were barely thicker than his wrists; old growth was reduced to stubby rings lined with shelves of mushrooms, the kind their spores allowed you to write on with pressure.

Except even this was unlike the memory,

every word bled with each droplet that condensed in the air around him, though he could not see their cloud. Maybe the cloud wasn't invisible, rather consuming each stalk, muddling each shape and notion in the same manner as the droplets' attack on each word still learning their form. Splotches of red and yellow in place of the crisp green he was used to at the ends of branches.

He reached out to feel,

but the mist, fog, cloud—he did not choose to name this haziness—obscured their form. A branch snapped in the distance. Something could still see it.

The trees seemed to recoil from the winds the same way he recoiled from whatever was out there. He failed and had known it. How could he cease to recall the strange, jagged slopes from the treetops of his mind? Not powerful enough to soar over, a wayfarer stiff in forget, a sinking log. Droplets gathered into puddles. The whole cloud reeks of purification, the spores hardly hold their shape in the water, and every word pushing through from his desperate scrawls is reduced to murky gibberish. Mushrooms swelled from cracks of the

dirt in his silence—until he could not think.

"Is this the end, a flood of emptiness?" Went the name of the last tree

La Poupée Qui Tué Pygmalion

You, the one who moulded her,

The one who always deserves,

What charm was she born with

That she has not yet earned?

By pen and by a bowstring taught,

Violent rage remained contained

Behind a rough clay face

Which you mistook for skin,

Despite each inkling oozing gently

From the slits for her eyes and mouth.

When arrows glide forth, their sharp turns

Through air, their erudite grace

Can only be rivaled by such deception.

For that girlish intensity is the reflection

Of a bloodthirsty intellect beneath.

Their silver threatens your pose, since she nipped at the rose—

Paint out the blush, and finish your tea,

So you may drown in a red viscous sea—

Isn’t it cold to lift a finger for your chisel…

When she bawls, “Joue avec moi,

Je te mets au défi! Joue avec moi.“