Roger Wallace

Laconic Apothegms for Sea-Travel


ISSUE 54 | DEGENERATES AND DECADENTS | JUL 2015

With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

I.

Slowing east on the ironed map, shore left lone, an umbrageous blind march,
A battling, wafts out a visit; unhostaged by the tongue of night,
Some indigent opining tones rumble the clarity of lost;
And that this waking will recede we of the walk know the portents;
Blare, though, now, what is held by string for the brought, blare that which is old now:

Prone private, there will wreathe a wreck unwept to let weigh bare-base acts,
That by a hop and a slack twist we might stumble upon stilted
Loathed stubs and walk by side-step and trip each wire of our kind
Encased in the dirt and with the touch of a hush scheme;
Bane, those roads clip the pith of the search for keys in the clear of the brush.

Homely-ward, this beast is bound to be in life, as no home ever seen,
So long as our eyes are our flesh, to look is to lock in the face
We cannot. In a pious peal it is made lit, we are lit
With it and we swell as moles swell the thick of the plane which claims truth;
Roiling earth reveals the homes which move below and those which move above.

Ballast cons the craft, physics says, because cuns the under the right route
To follow and keep to feet-felt the movement that stays in the sticks
Kept tunneled to cabins neath deck where the coal fires the forward,
But for a word, but for a word, goes the hewing and the hawing:
“Sure as all, that I shall walk as thou shalt rest, and have no journey stayed.”

Faith slakes fast in seen plots of doctrined dewed grass when sustenance takes fore
As the victuals, the gut-needs, take on the look of eglantines
In coyly revolting pleasures involved and many turns of the helm’s view
Are to be had in a long watch from an amputated vessel;
Eat up, then, here are all the goods and do-goods of many a night’s tongue.

 


Image by Fontaine Capel

 

II.

Pale drains tint of do-what-may from the sun’s bright, mesh of what-will hauls us,
A drumming tale, into a night; by a tongue, many, much-rused, rock;
Urned the vitriol of free speech, a mass song sub-learned churns a star’s brew
And is given to the slave prayer; the sound-singe of the cave and spear
Gleams lightless this pull of nested din towards where, in the skin, the bit chomps.

Ironed map, it is an innocence to hope, shades the mode of our tune,
I’d rather be dead than led such, Odious the Imitated
This tawdriest apocalypse of every eve will take as king,
Tundra-veiled dial of wake’s clock uninspects the relations made;
Ashy late, unrelate that cut that cut up these selves at light’s break:

“Meet what may, it is not ours to say the path, high, low, the blood and wind will blow
Through the diorama of spheres, the dimension in which sky shifts;
In the index that inscribes years, there are our names written, and lifts
The heart of the humble to tears, the fact of the onlyness, this
Come what will, up the wave and the hill that lurks, high, low, the blood and wind will blow.”

Silver-pealed chimes, to our nerves slice this single time into beginnings, ends;
The breadth of what is lyricized is equal to the distance gone.
Remiss we would be and, more, stripped, were we to sail without wide voice;
As rain mats the moving of mass, there is harmony that needs air:
Songs that smack of insidious resemblance to men do not hold here.

Tracheal drones these, our nocturnes and aubades, stones shaped in their ruins,
Sums of nothing, we will still prove that there is a worship in us;
A flooding wanes, the feeling twines a piece of the flowing with time,
The rolling-together of want sounds like the shaky sea; we ask
“What make we of these swirls a-lulling us, good sage, adage-giver?”

III.

Forests hide the hells of the mind as a mist and entrance brings a heat
Which looms of the fell and unknown and brings a blindness to foreground;
To involve the riddle, trained right, and bid a thread, wound, to shriek waste
Into odes that spawn lanes, fresh-paved, from the sideshows of an ethics:
Part the seas in the manner of the beat mule with a bet to make good.

Turned-there shade for a minute has held us and we wade in relation
To the elevated arced path upon which the perceived cooks out
As in a freeing of largesse that the bone of this fool’s feast might
Should bide in waddling gods’ white eyes, known only to those who will hear
When stars shine, a clarion of a some time, a speeding west shot-scald.

All coasts bled, these catechisms burn dear holes in the structure of jewelled speech
And my solace is a seeing and my solace cannot be seen
Under comfort of a curtain which is simple in its warm shock.
To peer at for the taking, men, I am that mask which makes.
Nest this din, steel-shod and open to the sky, in the day armed and wrapped.

Clues to mind are nothing but clues of friends, past, demeaned by a cold will
To make of margins the mainline and to rhyme a fullness of sight
Out of the pickings of the view which sits with us when the thought comes.
Who was it spoke to me last here? This corner staged a redressing.
Act like this, and then emerge again to walk with no broke-branch markers.

Hells time thought and erase sizes from old acts. That change behind that stage
Is sunk to lux perpetua, not to be buried but to glow
With the obstinate grate of gone each time I turn and wash with dark.
Away the memory of love that sat at this stump and said that
“Some day I will be here again as vivid but you will not bring this”

 


Image by Fontaine Capel

 

IV.

Lain over the boards of the flailed, twitching earth is the lacquer of myth.
I have spoke to some kind turnings and with them I have made a life
And then another, with loose care, have I shorn these yearnings with twists
On the same themes, through the same paths. The eyes form outside the banished
Realm I walk, and wonder in their blinking lock, who paints for me my ground.

This turn says “a sun is breaking which has not”, and I am he who has not.
Unpossessed by a having, I am broken like a marked branch
Which notes such seasonal changes as are convenient for road maps
And other heuristics which can, we hope, give to mazes clear shape.
Lightly held, devoted in the arm of day, I perform a kid’s play:

“May come as the rowing of the dungeon blues or maybe a dream-snooze,
The shimmer of the round-the-bend saying I have been and will be
In spite of the chase of the Black Cook who wants, wants, wants, oh! to eat me,
I sneak and I place roses round and the bend shimmers with a sound,
Like crash! and like a sinking into the sea, this Black Cook won’t eat me!

Dumb stoops this burly and this frightening fiend, with cross of misery
To thrust on me when I am caught, but it’s for naught, it is to whet
A boiling in my sigh towards lee that he bumbles through the bramble;
That dour float of afternoon sustains no howling at the moon:
Get hot coals, whatever way can be managed, and man the stern and go!”

Keel to break, and all of those etceteras, kids to bully boredom
Will take to and make much hoopla; the cohering cannot be done
But with a ringing of the sun when it breaks and hangs something there
Which has been and yet still will be anew when held as play of light,
Wrung cool high from coming-forth of lying hard and by the singing air.

V.

Childlikes, who resent the tired sight scene always ordering one
With basic matches and trite pairs for the symbols that have been learned:
A word, seductive and hang-ready, always waits to present itself
As though it is in fact a bird, but I know these meanings myself,
Lady Language, and require your suggestions for nothing, ho!

“Laid watery, my birds embrace night” leers at my lazed eye
To find vulnerable stitch marks in the carpet of the unreal
So to tatter-spit to tumult spells of speak-back to the senses -
(I tapestry my own mind and bear flowerlessness in daytime) -
Cruelly, the floor, brittle, invites live birds and the flying ceases.

Hung most high, that aesthete’s stand which shouts, contends, “Make a big beaut, pert point
From the littlest things strewn about”, but it is an adolescent,
Incorrigible in hatred, who can know of the blandness
Which must have been manifested in aeonic oppression,
Time unthought, when no banners above slight shapes could let wind give bright breadth.

Thoughtless-well, the condition of the builders, with all being but wrought
In iron artifice and sought neoclassically, delivered
Through a weak hagiography of repetition of “I am”
Deriving from animal need to clamor to convince oneself
Time lies not, we may make brothers of clean lines and be consoled by birds.

Night, brace against the wisdom of the same-phrase, simple embrace won’t make
The dusty maneuver of life, a coiling work of complication,
Into a labor of a live grasp, a toil of which men are cast;
Impressive it is to read ruth in one’s delicate surviving,
Swift the load of living empathy will lift. Look up, a black shocks shine.

 


Image by Fontaine Capel

 

VI.

Half-stirred self suspends in the underwave dawn the humming of combat,
That little war I like to wage so much less than so many do.
In this mote, dazzle-draped instant, there is only the face untold,
It cannot be told or cut up and it sheds as skin from its glance
What kings then have the right to carve like meat what rights can be called meat.

Scorch the earth to plate to cull from the slashed shred what is hung on the limn,
To cage a whim-freight of flash-dread out of these shed skins of not-war;
To wit, I am but a cheap whore for the high and for the kept-low
And in this dark hull a sick fuel lits a grey sky to see by;
Lord make it that we may swim through the drought’s tide with this wrought-of-a-whim.

Slits like wales to give to else a curve strike form, one through eyes and one touch,
It is too much not to limit; so guns and chains heave to borders
To set up an am of trite pairs, as trite as your right foot and left,
Am I am and am not not-am: now we’ve got something to fight for;
Crane these wails up above the field and thrust them for the sake of one name.

Who lays claim to the undivided sifts fate and renders death a vague word.
Is becomes an instrumental which succumbs to bowdlerizing,
A power with its pros and cons: the seeker cannot sit with friends
Chum-chumming about what we are or this sunday morning’s peignoir;
No cruel lines leaves a noodling he calls a search and a flat field he folds.

Sightly self emerges to eyes to whom sight is bargained and bartered,
Invested, arraigned for good use, inoperant the “functional”
Or, say, the function of smoothness; for friction unfurls a flag
Which makes for binary most clear, if we see what is heard when we
Slip now south, of the universe, masters’ way, towards that Wall grown in age.

VII.

Bull-eared with my laissez-faire mien means it’s a mean game to laze, leer
Or choose to hear a maze or grunt as worth the undamming of such
Middles of trifles and to damn! the fishers of the clear speech crew
‘Cause who, good interlocutor, can locate the course of the Hand?
Evening’s sluice struck and the breath sham and coddled, who am I to game on?

Blear out a laugh for a free fiend who sits miserere tonight
In front of the papers arrived by post this day in the boon-box
Which warn to deflate the standard with a rush from reserve boy’s coins.
Can the hand who locates good cause in the coarse low-cure those who compute
Seen things? Though, it’s true, we’ve little interest in the converting thing.

When worded, does a home become a loon’s ward as soon as it’s heard
And herded? It depreciates, at least, in use to the speaker
Who must always preserve value through control, through a mere trickle
Of what one really means to say on the thinkings of this and that;
Post the papers of the day’s boon in the front of the box only.

Runs scare you, if you’re small and new to the trade, it’s all flutter and flight
Of ticket-stubs, garbage, vague terms and turns of phrase, a flood of cents
Refusing to add up to more than individuations, ticks
On the one-two ballyhoo checklist of red, green, and the rest;
Take a prize, it may be snatched with only will, from the falling papers:

“Nine mocks eight and this is a non-plus to me, shall I find in-between?
The invention of decimals follows Dante’s old divisions:
No man may do bad and none good. We say there is but utility
And so we’re always just a mix, a pull of points along a line;
Vectors died, along with many men and thoughts, some centuries ago.”

VIII.

Flit by whim, the willowy beasts of hot souls in dire going, gone
Through civil poise’s assumptions of the human by right design;
A clearing of the viscera clouds the mind, an organ too, out-
The coverage not of rain-bringers but of sun-fearers and rags.
Curt commands come dawdling through the day’s chambers to let us in on us.

Tropes tell of the ephemeral sweep of love and hint at the formless:
These are the papers which, falling, have found the right wind and bearers.
Future recallings of faith’s face hinge much on present religion
For an inspirational thought of the actionable temporal
Which may rummage through the dustbin and find those red wrung shreds called weight.

Pressed white flakes parse the concerns of the soulful, the parsing done gentle
And speedily as they near ground, the unchosen ascending fresh
The layers of the singing air to await another young boy
To whom the choices are not choices and the silences are needed:
“Would a sun burn a hole in the sky to make seen the soft face that I know?”

Sent sonnets and the meager notes of the daily come like acid in rain,
It might be imagined, might come: in the earth and yet from an else,
The parts arranged and still unchanged, worked in the fabric to be
Animated again when called to their responsibility:
Sun-papered skeins load spangle-tackled claims onto the hearer’s pens.

Desirous spins inside a wraith of with what can be made day’s shape,
This self-love-lie corner-curled whelps “Was my sworn note hurled
About a reality reel? Have their been axes which can steer
A maimed hemming of a true hue towards rightly wrested tamed stemmed am?”
Cud can come again on its own to the mouth and make much of a taste.

IX.

Plaited mercy appears in some gaunt line’s face and thus I trace the time;
To whom does one inscribe such quilts of such kind? Gentle, disastrous,
Employing no conspirators in my reckoning of long love
But the flat surface extended of the word as the beginning;
Jockey forth children or sit sunny, content: the entrances abound.

Troubling to have to ask “mercy from what pain?” or “which chaos creates
This weakness for salving patterns of a whim and a night-black weight?”
A trouble itself a pattern, though, and the imminence of thought
Descends slender and un-Chronos about questions of boyish coin,
Trammeling the focus of the unappeased and mapping mankind’s mind.

Curled in a corner we find, maybe, sex; lightly woven, harsh once
Its arabesque held in that court, the Conceit of Significance,
Where one practices the technique of the measure of needs to wants,
Artisanry of the utmost with inheritance of reference:
“Lusty moves,” scholarizes one variant, “move well with my like-field”.

Dewey’s digits applied to a thinking quilt with room for each used thought,
A fix of circular guidance in a circular time turning
To face itself as its father and conclude a wisdom therein,
“Look at the had like the now-is, huddle round the old like mirrors”
Lazy pity writing a history with glee with the words of me and me.

In coldly stirring seasons when that walk strays, I look upon and praise
The all and sundry of this soul where a million solutions lie;
I look as though I have not made these eyes which themselves lie in sight
Of a sewn and twisted hanging on the wall, a fabric which I
Lay flat down on the floorboards’ support and walk one more day to the door.

X.

Tick toll morn! as the darlings of my nightmares scatter into daylight
Recall a recent, do you, red glare? foam of novel, do you, still write?
The burnt halo of a lifetime, this rare grace, a sometimes gift-dream,
Is rent by a need to be rent but I render it all fresh now,
Fierce words reign, I look blank at staid day, there is no torture to the mind.

Mourn secrets, in your waiting on the slow train, the secret cross your own:
“Of a sprinkling in Spring I sing, a fog lightly lush, petalled air
In a float groundward ere waking, when broke the spiralled banshee scream
The air with sharp earthy flat tones and this life game with ruleless rhyme,”
Thus time there has been for some love and this time there might be at will.

Bells dole work out as in what we call past time, when out rang the new age
Upon unsuspecting forbears, passionate bellies made much of
In the race without a win-end, and dawn marks just one begin-end
In this race without its own age towards the supreme meal to be had;
All men sit at tables of figures and let their words go to mash-mash.

Meantime looks, of and toward nothing of much note, hobble along eye-paths,
Polite first this light-oh-dreary, these are the manners of the poor class,
To collate one’s tepid viewpoint, as clerks seek elisions in math,
With the dimmer still face at hand and to hand out prizes herein:
“Give me news of my freedom by relation, that I may dismiss thought.”

Shudder so, us barrow haulers in taut form, and self-strengthen by song,
Up full of heart and ignorance the bawdy slope of fleshy hope,
In ice to wither and mottle our tawny kingdoms with sick bulbs
Or else to be seared luridly in an unmartyerable flame;
Look now, won’t you? to the tune of poetry, some forests pitch their last call.

XI.

Can’t but cry. Inlaid waste gloams the lovely thought, flakes the homes of the calm,
The rotation rutted cricks down, reveals the fixed and gore-fused core,
When most were out looking for it. Slap! in the fault of the social-
A tumbling-up of the Big Man is the most that we call justice;
Cram what can, in the swelter of orange demands, fit in the trunk of good.

Bled senses, a lewdness which melts the kind word, this day it hugs too rough!
The embracing of the heat colds the tremulous vegetal bones,
A carry-me spoke as a dream becomes the beauty of blood-lets,
That a boy will sing to his sword and the air can have no response:
“Fare me down, into the risen of death’s age, keep the light for our Lord”

Bread of class, that meat which will fill pride’s belly, and work of the great act,
These demand themselves for the roused even as their night-wrenching wrecks
The objects which serve baser needs; a riot fiddles with glory,
A sounding of the underkept steals a thunder of the old days,
Steam to cook, as in the kitchen of the poor, the simple repeated.

Repeats, though, are effected by some fight-backs, and more simple than lunch:
“Immolate, mush-mush, the mushers; make of this moon a much-marred May,
May we marry our mash to muck and mangle our mothers to mash,
If murder makes them much move-shy or mates their most-high with mercy,
More wood for this model of most-good-made Man, the mind of the many”

Plates unfilled are not filled by will of Big Men, nor brave are they in theft
To surge at a call of harangue, upbraid the all of what serves;
Inexact will be the active and humility goes and goes
The mess of the unheard human to the careless and the line reads,
“Blackened bugs, in tunnels of sooty malice, make many scary sounds”

XII.

Bodes red sleep for the looking-past of sleeptime, a ringing of the rage,
Through such an ignoble broadcast of the twinkling, fawning airwaves;
A hanging of our laundried mirth in the even stream of our sun,
Such a star as never will cease to drain obscure wishes’ self-faith,
Vains goodwill in a stolid view of our aims and lays to rest our speech.

Fan some cards in a composition of peace: “There are no judges true”;
If you should have talent for games, let then friendly leisure lead you
Beside the wealth of a sung past, steeped in a culture of self-love
In the direction of blurred tones which sweeten the practice of hate,
Frenzied hate, in a godly reformation, into the love of life.

Listful Liebhabers of the moral project, how can one deny you?
It’s a turgid, slick rationale that can bring truce to your likeness,
A darling dalliancing goad’s grin that can bring an end to fixed Good;
I mourn for the bitter, stale choice, the preserving of the cowing!
Now shots hear again the sound of their own choice and the gamblers roll dice.

Slap noise to the cause of the nothing-making eruption of hard and harder
If a rolling of the fife drum should fail to stabilize what’s asked;
Let the kettle roll the water down the street with no prayer drolling
About what discipline can do for the cause, cause, cause the silence
Worn useless, to give to some meaty fun shouts, a nothing of act-now!

Cries clear shame, such times as we refuse life in, for the doer and deed,
Though one’s own death cannot be more than that of a million or more
Or less than any item, drab, that plays its hand as it knows how.
To the walls come the meek and made and fraying goes the twine of act,
Marline torn, as when a bug lunges a mate, the who gets lost in it.

XIII.

Shimmer “I” and rose the circle of my run, what fun yet in the chase
To whom I stoop and beg, like boom! when the little sloop hits the rocks
And heads down-down, oh my baby, the horizon now is curling;
That’s a coo, make it hollow, ho! It is a very large circle,
Damned if can get to the taking off again, from this drab homily.

Well, so then, there is a speech to the unformed and this peering wears too
Of respiration by violence and this living (life?) that conscripts.
The breath is a trial to last and I’ve been invited elsewhere,
Am perpetually so called, by a smooth voice in a crisp horn:
“Fare the flood and say ‘Yes, this is to have grace’ or make right quick and come”

Hum, these spins! How the cresting of lacunae emblazons the bone-shake,
It’s a rattling of your ma’s tune and she hasn’t struck the clock yet,
It’ll strike you if you don’t watch; the holes you’ve burned mount the body,
The raking of ancestry bare, this is the courage that sends one
Low, low, low and unto the waste that begets, sheaving all the been-there.

Ark-stained flight, erasure of film that sublates, we are entering sin.
Indentured scansion of burst blood will have to hold this frame upright;
The fey, crept up the back of me, through the crack of the sensed makes noise.
O light of lode of heft and care, the sodden beams of singing air
Flayed so soon, would that I had sung to someone! would that memory elate?

Culled from shreds, a feeding of the yet-sated proceeds from the present
And circumvents, with care, the all. The at-length-lost of the belled self
Retains but tinny trace of past and dries to the heat of each kiln,
Betrayer, good book, or long love, which it enters, for day or year;
Pyre-lain, a name’s knowing smokes itself free of the unwrit freedom.

XIV.

Mad habits will make of a man old madness as old cream will curds make.
To prance to just a plain rag tune with the grace of an affliction
A doter might scheme some plans out or lay cautious traps for mundane
Deliverers of sane targets but yet some can not live as else
But trap-breakers, convicted of gluttony, taking too much bad milk.

Crisper come the days sometimes to the hazed sight, beyond scruples and gameplay
There are allowed but seldom walks, among a lucid race of needs,
Announcing the survival urge as does a brash German fanfare:
“To be is the only thing ought and it is lovely for all days,
Keep beating that fatty red heart’s metered pulse, everyone must give all.”

Demons, it’s no good to demonize them, better to tribute well
The empire, the core of sin, to financialize their truth claims
For what wins money but battles? And we can afford all losses
In the enactment of this earth which slips even now towards elsewhere.
Glaring derision makes one a free wise man, who knows his gods well too.

Yet rain riots oft in the world of such men, against common called things
With delirious weeks’ insight in an expulsion of friend’s speech
Amounting to taunts, though not meaning, at precious necessity’s face:
“What could you shiver out of me that I could not shake best alone?”
Courage, tells us a great book, is to lie down at the base of the climb.

Annie poor and Annie sad, she made herself a sanctuary bed
Upon which she could float her name among an equal sea of names
And she pinned to her own weak craft a banner which flickered but held
In the paltry wind of the night, the sinking, slant night of a mind:
“Bray your breaths, do not let them slip out lambent, the water might yet freeze”

XV.

Graft golden onto a mumbling rebellion, it sells tickets for friends
Who service the chat with oil, duty to dress you with stammer;
It gets them hyped for your slash-fest, when the bleating bust-strips the sigh
And from the prow to the homeland a craned wail of what new type rings:
“Arise there, ye wondrous race of prefixes, to meet your fucking doom”

Clammy hands, shy to the kneading of thought’s path, make use of your God’s gift:
Intern these posts of prelit lamps and let them learn the pop of Mine
To the tam-tam of your red mind which fats the measure of the tune
That the many would live in one, the hope of the leaderless plucked,
Cowed, sold out, and dribbled to the silt of soul, parade-o of woe-flame.

Patter - “Date is a matter of much fresh spit, we to the dial go,
Elate us like the men to come and who have come with your smooth spin,
It so sultries the stress, the guilt of the try to move at self’s pace,
A-maze us, a-lull us, by turn; erase that veil which surveils us” -
Praises time in its increments, smallest bits, looks for motion thrustless.

Deem such death, if a flirt with grace keeps you tough, and raise an apt rejoin:
“Illtrod wide windings cheap we scorn and habit of gap-life as well,
There is no in-between two times and that pull that wrecks us is God,
A galloping-away from fixed which stirs which fates can lay our stones,
Shapeless sum, to the shoulder of humans’ wheel, that torrid deathless ride.”

Bate the hands, and lose what role in form they had, who snap to the hour;
It is impious to breathe slow and make nothing of the exhale.
Emaciate, those turning types, as they sirenize you to join,
Intend wellness in harsh treatment, the axe as the pardon applied:
“Fret no blood, it is in evidence of life, slice out what sickens you”

XVI.

Home-mores have the touch of a good Godly scheme and will regale the wife
With the trimmings of religion (oh I recall a face of faith!)
Without the meeting of big names or even a meeting at all;
We see her as the day when she, to quote an old stylist’s style,
“Pressed her johns long into the wash and forgot the thigh will be done soon.”

As it is, in the heaven of the dish rag, brimming with eyes lovestruck
By the briny fullness of shapes, those which solely make up the seen,
The hailing of joy may be threshed from the tithes of time to the shared,
That warless realm that calms the will and makes of agreement an art;
What fool, sage, would deny what makes ease of air, that which lightens the dark?

“Mother made a thick and a pungent home’s brew, and woo-hoo, trouble went
Into the street for the lustful and out to the shacks of the sloths;
The tigers, small as a twiddle, for us, waddled in these clean cloths,
The fuming of a nether place a wishing only of low lives,
Toast the taste of the rounded room and locked door, the held shore, the shared land.”

Stowed adrift, the addling of needs with questions, the pores lead the eye’s path
And raise this direction aloft, evince a grace-wading from sensed.
The figured film of each coy look deserves the trust of delight’s truth
If the sweating of the night’s warmth can lade each hole in the head full:
“Hold there, shade, that I might mix your dark with mine, and dream in wakeful light”

Crack the door, and peek at the words made to twist, and know where the choice stands;
The hearth’s ignorant cohesive should be snatched by any who can
(As are else the falling papers or the kind menaces that melt)
Return the latch with a blank look, and look no more to the roaming,
Mothers, heed: don’t let your sons grow up with dreams to go the storied way.

XVII.

Truth functions as a trial to endure long, and the weight of a life lived
Already, in all ways, comes harsh to the liar, but easy too;
The situational steers men about the axes of their steel,
Upwards, one way, of spoken trust; down and down, another, towards
Parts’ take of the place of the whole and rightly then should I choose to speak.

Much-cadenced affectations of stale deceit pale to the practiced prate,
The teller by necessity, the tall tale builder lionized
In later days, heartily, sure, as having been vast in visions,
Uninvited and straight worthless to the merchants of his own day:
“Sell me stories luminous, imprecate what you cannot (sad!) live.”

Sped up much, the release of the slack held tight by the distances of talk
When the internet makes a farce of in saecula saeculorum;
No string to imagine past men as also men but a plug-in
To the dutiful operation of the believing of culture.
Aged this talk, like a wine which is back-dated, as soon as it hits the page.

Still pen in, for the sake of some fresh Godhead, a prayer which obtains, or don’t;
Enclose something before it’s print on the hearer’s pins with gold font
Or, well, if rallies exist, don’t bore too much effort on just fences
When you will be believed despite the roam and the sale of your herd.
Stock up now, if your money’s with the ancients, on the pleasures of the home.

Sleight tries, they may call themselves in fleeing worth from worry of shocked stares
To heaven-havens of tilled ground in the real’s lawful telling-tales,
These ill fables who must move slow if they are still to move some way;
Never die, though, I know I don’t, before you’ve got yourself an end:
Wail a bit, yes, yes, to get ahead of it, then let it, quick! hard-dry.

XVIII.

These slick presents sew their own ends and become sorrow’s railed worked pasts;
In some deflection occupied, I have pried away a few lives
From an arrangement of baseboards, loving and leaving all
To prostrate the vision with them, a column that can hold me still,
Rolled-up will, the cleaning-out of time has come, a view cannot remind.

Whitened eyes are ogling the locks of the cars, the locomotive hope
To travel into the brushed land, the clothing that’s worn in your hands
Irradiated by fake lips, a brittle silk draping toward warmth;
Unstab the innocent of mine, the flowing-between serves the heart;
Writhe, don’t move, these hides lace the outline of rest, orient this burned route.

“Call home when…” to the wind allures the dry past and through a steep pass
The laundry of targets, tokens mastering their moment
Ruminates as ascent sure-goes, to tame I’ll miss yous arrived late
The enemy has never fought, what of these loose wheels which slide forth?
Croak home’s wish, through the onerous taste of tin, the ale of the slow train.

Sealed luck, the views which drifted by, held us, and now purse regret’s kiss;
To puck, puck, pucker is my mode, swell the pools of the pained to break,
Allay wallowing with a glare, efface the face of those love-dreams
Which eat their way through a fine sky, irrupt into my little play,
Sedate sound of waylaid clouds of other times bedazzling but the bored.

Constellate the image of an unbroken, criss-cross all tedium
By hoary running of the strength that strikes the holes that give the light
That undulate and make blue sleep of a waif of an instant’s heat;
The sayings of ambition pass, the ambitious men go to sleep:
Blue sleep’s wish is to furl the wishing flag, unrelate the cut made.

XIX.

Bloody sea does what but reflect through soul’s pane the pondered, bodied sky?
These suns are ladlings of old broth into crisply painted, cracked bowls,
Bringing human shadings to ears as well as to eyes and pictures
Which hang, ready, between these vasts of one blue and of another.
Sure-sensed still, by the pent, parametered sight, are the movements of mass.

Pining meld of one revolution’s wander, cool diction of a day,
That your peal swills we have all seen, that it’s devouring can still
The strumming of a cold triumph to the flooded serene that depths
Impasse to tear and fate to will. A hand raises thus to your health:
“Strayed attempt, by imitation of love brought, by loving of death go”

Stunted trip, in the rearing of a duped babe, you’ve made hell high and bade
The stinging of our bit, whipped skin by the beraters and beat paths
To stretch its vice into mercy and leash each captor to your post;
In this we have heard you and sung a shamed war to a thick vanish;
Blinded march, we must release you to keep hope and to see our way through.

See the sky ponder, through the bodies and blood, the sole pain of reflection:
That there are those who will not look, will never in this short gaze look.
Amassed siftings congeal to peep, to pray, to briefly make the try
But they will be yet (hush!) denied. And the clanking of our woed cogs
Casts their dice towards a few more walls and sapped man gathers the wood and would.

Ship a sorrow to give a rhyme of fullness and moments lived afar;
Unbreak the bread of this name-day fool’s feast giving of the secrets
To brandish, to instill, and pump through these veins flush and watery.
An ice floe bares leafy still-births to a lugubrious, same sky;
Wave a good-bye and avail yourself of a feeling - ooh - like a cry.


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