developing melody

can you feel it
coming down

raindrops
breaking on the ground

can you
hold it steady

catch
breakdowns

swallow
get the rundown

sundown sailing
away

parenthetical personality

(parenthetical personality)
close yourself in
stay solitary
get on the balcony
get thee to a library
get thee to a galley
get comfortable
on the boundary
lock away
(parenthetical personality)

phonological refraction

poet heating connections
illuminations between
perceptions, reflections,
and what it means to mean
anything at all
poetry finding connections
in rhythm and sound
as meter and rhyme
as liters of lime
as greeters of grime
as cheaters of time
suddenly connecting
citrus resurrecting

nonsensicalifork in the road
encrypt the code
select your mode,
on we go

fricative fractaling

fractals

fracturing borderlines

crumbling into 

absences

clothy 

sturdy 

makes

meaningless fragility

    combusting at the seams

meanwhile, jars on hilltops

define surroundings

(back to you)

impressions, expressions

express
impress
press to shape
the clay of  concept
expression
impression
                 (pressure for precision, for appreciation, for preciousness)
defied cameras
expressionism
                  (                )
remembered the war
breathe in; out
swing into the abstract
let me get that fire back
equilibrium
to entropy
don't you not come back to me

outward floating

a matter of time

I.

i have the strength of time within me
i have mountains, quiet valleys
within me

the way we are made of matter
we are made of time

II.

time: relative

mathematicians theorize 

one or two dozen dimensions

how limited our perspectives
how are limits
in/beyond linearity?

i wouldn't call this certainty


III.

wildflowers
grains of sand

all the future happened
already exists

all that existed 

exists

IV.

i cannot see my eye

cannot see the self
cannot see itself

V.

branching, quaking,
squirming, shaking,
becoming

what is the all?

the piece of totality asks itself

the lady of permutations

changing textures

as food becomes the body
becomes conscious, 

what are the boundaries of change?

what of change?
in what time?

VI.

time passes 

bodies pass 

relative to other bodies

all the same thing

zoom out

time lapse

same thing


VII.

mountains crumbling, rising sea,
silt layering, eroding

churning matter through

you have mountains in you





----
Footnotes: 

The image of hills in me comes from Jesse Stuart's Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, sonnet 47 (1934).  
The "Lady of Permutations" is from Dante's Inferno, Canto VII. I like John Ciardi's translation.
The images of the wildflowers and grains of sand are from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence."

Swan Songs

Sing our songs
Wring our wrongs

Ring the gong

Among the long, the stung,
the strong of lung:

swan songs--