achilles at night
young man,
i'm about to fix this unmagic heel
with which you might've held onto me.
you see i've grown callouses the color
of jasmine on my palms,
yet i see in them only her bosom,
whose inner sanctum, hero's clustering
around these nights away, yet appears
as honeyed through the torrid
red eyes of enraged entanglement
as through the soft damp slits
of home, mad cloister.
yes toss me that jipijapa, son.
i'll endeavor to be wise.
recognize first
...that deeds rattle back, spurting
...wordless theatric shrieks
...pantomiming a severed tongue;
second
...that conscious calm is never more than razor thin;
...is ever a blood niche of compacted whole;
and finally
...that only in the spirit-touching scald of sad jism
...(and never in peace, never in th'unmitigated density of things)
...will you know the blessed sensation of bursting calm.
listen to the night!
you'll see, as through history,
the voyaging west wind bears
the memory of the world, its dark rattle
disturbing each sheephide garment (shadowed
winding sheet of soldier and shepherd alike)
reminding in the halted breath of its misgivings
that the dead, after all, go nowhere.
Prove it you say?
Let me instead predict
the future bearing witness
to our progenies (yes yours, too)
making white-armed, dog-eyed love
in the suffocating expanse of automobiles
in america
while the flies loathed today
so viscerally
yield to even the laxest swat
of the hand-held yellow grids
of modernity.
therefore, my son, i beseech you
make a business of your viciousness.
just once see that calm's business,
only and non-negotiably,
is with undifferentiated being
and you'll make haste
i promise you
to take your valu-paks and go home.
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I am a software exec. and I do secret internet foo. I live near Boston, Massachusetts and spend a lot of time in San Francisco.
I began writing poetry a few years ago in a brave but ultimately feckless attempt to stave off a canonical entrapment breakdown.
I sometimes write with a pseudonym: Yorick_Nixon. I also write music and play musical instruments. I was a member of Boston noise band Inner Beauty and San Francisco improv combo Senator Buchanon. With the members of Inner Beauty I co-authored a pre-web internet published dystopic novel entitled "Skunk Angst".
Any spare time I have I read Shakespeare or listen to Bach. Bach seems to be the one thing all nerds agree on. I've lost touch with my culture. Though my friend Janet has turned me onto Cat Power. My only firmly held cultural belief is that Chan Marshall of Cat Power is kind of a babe. |
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