Part 5 (1/2)

Time brought increased notoriety.

Saucy times with a soupcon of respect for the artful dodger.

Givens change, an armful of orange lilies, limp & loathsome, on a tombstone door before trumpets of rain.

Graven images. Lifeless stone.

Death became stone.

Stone empty. The maggot emptiness burrowing into chiselled easel and the stone-cutter's savage magic.

Just a bitty stone to herald a pa.s.sing.

Night-jars.

Old straw-chairs with a broom p.r.o.nouncing the wall base with its touch empty, the empress of bandages leaning to rags

On table sc.r.a.ps, sorry gloom of an old building by a pickled lake leaking into ebb twilight.

The coronation of the nightmare, the moon with her billowing robes and withered spoon unfolding midstream ...

la cauchemar ou denudee soiree to discover, with wonder, ices with sherbet reek like nightsweats; a windsail of pooled light thru puddles of trees.

Brackish backwater-- thoughts of black ice and huddled ma.s.ses of silver breaking thru the sun's winter curtain as erupting coins.

SHAMROCK

Is there anything prettier than that-- to stare into your manifold s.p.a.ces toward the hook & vine of cathedral leaps, the vaults & crypts as go-betweens of an earthy wors.h.i.+p, the supine female form?

By quiet pools, thrush in the thicket with red berry behind its eye, miniature sun proceeding by the branch to undress the bark with leaves as pa.s.sionate culprits kissing dark.

Clasped hands upward lies the sky my masterpiece angel, I bite lush meadows, tread spongy brooks, endear daring small of back, crevice taste nape and neck, a beatific pilgrim nearing a fleshy way-station, first charting his compa.s.s, fathoming a probe to collect armfuls of starlight & shade, hair, eye, lip like fragrant sea-grape --pine & cedar bough in love-lorn resin smile.

LOST PATROL

Blue walls were grottoes, subterranean panels for covert messages, the occasional mot juste squirrelled up thru paint & memory.

Something like guitar strings dangling only you employed tear sheets from Rolling Stone (counter-culture fly paper to catch the runny ma.s.ses).

The blue walls existed as firing ranges, gunpowder plots for ideas scribbled on pencil waves like the movement of snakes (or commandoes on their bellies) thru desert sand.

Blue walls. Blue grottoes.

Blue moods to temper finger oases (tap-tap of skeletal tree on your window pane) crawling thick with pregnant fruition with the bayonet lull of words.

Snippets of that legacy (hobnailed like a lost patrol) forlorn as yellowing pages or dusky petals unfolding.

BLACKAMOOR

Breaking up-- as in the cloissone jar you dropped. . .

little regard, a few brittle pieces scattered about the floor.

Let's call it ”shedding feelings”. Expensive?

There's always another humidor tucked away in the cranny of another antique shop; after all, a woman is only a woman although a fine, Cuban import is a worthy smoke.