Each silence is a resignation

This we know

But what of the pages

What of the ink potential

What of every contour the hand does not form

Every word the pen neglects

How many stories are languishing 

Growing stiff as inert wrists

Would-be writings ossifying

Becoming the second skeleton

The one that rattles

Not in the casket

But the name

Every moment is fallible

The heart murmurs are my expectation/reflection

Paired and pacemaking

Ba-dum

As if unaware

That the clocks are being replaced

With silvery weightlessness and second hands that don’t tick

Just glide along

No percussive disappointments

No infinitude of jolt and halt

Time is still there

The hand sweeps round, then again

But it isn’t to be counted

As some pasts shouldn’t be recounted

If my pulse must be mechanical

Must my mind content itself to clockwork?

They had bells

The Victorians

Bells and string

To prevent this sort of thing

These farewells

The Victorians

Shattered with a ring

The sound resurrecting

Those whom error befell

But we

We take no precautions

And our coffins

Have no string

While alive our words are buried

Condemned

To memory

What is written

What is spoken

Doubt inters

Prematurely

Every remnant petrified

In fitful

Testimony

I scraped at the charcoal immediacy of todays and tomorrows

And found preserved the pastel impressions of my past

Those soft miracles of texture and memory 

Those back of the eyelid scenes

That remain the way the softest sounds refuse to fade

The high clear notes of old promises float

And it is the same

As the sinking of those pinkish backdrops

I carry them with me as I go

Because, they tell me, somewhere

Beneath all the streaks and striations

I was a child

They stand as columns

They carry inscriptions—names I once pronounced

I pass beneath the marbled certainty

A chamber ceiling of gleaming propriety

The weight they uphold

Their permanence casts no shadows

They know only to be upright

But white is not the color of purity

It is gild that has reflected back all light

In any other hall, these pillars would adorn

Here they are barren trees

And their silence is the ringing echo

Of my footfalls as I near the altar

To take my place in the mausoleum

The tug of departure

:

Lines of latitude become cages

How willing is my wingspan?

And how ambitious my annals?

Not vertebrae, not pages

But months will test my spine

Will I answer to Janus?

Or let anonymity rend every sheet

And know that no faces are mine

What haunts you

This incandescence

Softens the shadows

But what of the filament

Glowing line, defined

And uncompromising

The bulb presumes nothing

But we find shades

To dome the heat, entomb the flash

Neat yellow cones between us and blindness

There, there is burning brilliance and we will it dimmed

God forbid we singe our sensibilities

We worship our lamplight certainty

Yet wonder why our faithfully lit ceilings 

Lack contrast

The hours go

So unconditionally. 

I’m made to watch,

Thinking of fingertips.

The crowds are hushed, reverent;

My voice is a heretic’s snarl.

The taste of metal changes nothing.

My tongue taps no telegram.

Is it magnetization that brings me

Forward? I shift

The paper in my hands

Each time I repeat its words,

Suddenly someone who cares about

Pronunciation.

To be

Someone

Who could separate sound from 

What it might look like for paper

To be

Stop-motion-blotted 

With ink. Every song a surface every

Surface a frame.

Who could hear music without

Seeing stained dimensions: one, two.

Who didn’t arrive nightly

To be

Passenger to blood sirens in the ears.

Who didn’t feel the hours as 

Palpitations

The difference

Between prerogative and hypocrisy

Between caution and paranoia

Between autonomy and Ptolemy

Between introspection and deflection

Between reminiscence and relapse

Between speech and script

Between dream and delusion

Is the difference between flight and levitation—

—Writes the thing floating inches above the floor

Tessellated fears

Saturated dissonance

(Em)pathetic indentations

Arrive in a fit of cosmic irony

Reformation

Once laced itself around me

Now I doubt those threads

Shades of windows descend, rasping

Harmonizing with the scrape of the ladder 

That falters at the gutters and begins to slide

Down the side of the house

Down with the sun

As the equinox sinks back to the earth

A cue for the housepeople to retreat

To recede, resorbed into rest

By birthright.

Do we serenade the night

Freely as a storm will perform

An unrehearsed flourish,

Reveling in its own downpour

Until gracefully dissipating,

Or are we captive like the stars,

Calling our place the heavens

To forget that we did not choose it,

Succumbing to the night as its lifeless display

Arbitrary motion

That we call loss

The constellations do not pivot

And even if the stars did shift with our seasons

Our lines would be artifice still

Drawn as comfort

As distraction 

From the axis drawn without our consent