In Dreams

I had the most tedious dream last night

It was a nice break from the livid folks who usually squat in the abandoned, rotting lofts my

subconscious locks away

A nice break from the men and women who peel back layers of skin and thick, greasy

subcutaneous fat just to put it all back in place or insert unripe melons beneath their ass cheeks in some sort of rural plastic surgery

Before jackhammering at each other in an orgy of flapping tissues

It was a nice break from the stretching dusty road lined with countless emaciated people,
            each with a wooden box full of coin and trinkets, begging for food as my family and
            I pass them by,

Leading up to a great arabesque city, terrace upon terrace stacked with buildings looming
            out of the yellow desert atop a mountain of rock baked brown by the sun

In the off-level buildings of that city I watch generations of my family live and die, myself

amongst the first inheritors, turning into but an observer from a loft in the blue desert sky upon my passing

The only other spectator to the dwindling of the family tree as we bred ourselves down to

nothing was a dog gifted with longevity greater than our individual epochs

He saw as we passed the tablet down and amongst each other, squabbling over how to and
            who should use the cryptic gray thing

And you I saw, off to the side and ephemeral with a grace of lips and shock of hair that bely
            your hold on the entire situation

            * * * * *

In this dream, though, I had a whiteboard on which I’d drawn a simple figure’s outline in green

Then blue, then red— for each time I drew, the beginning faded by the time I reached the end

So I tried again with a different color every time, meticulously stroke by stroke

Just to find that I was always left with a whiteboard empty if I didn’t try to fill it again

A Storm

My vessel crashes thick upon these undulating waves

Gray and salty with tumultuous intent

I spy your lighthouse through the kaleidoscopic mess of my looking glass

The direction your beacon points scattered in the briny fog

My hands slip and crack on splintered wood and fraying rope

The prow of my vessel draws ever closer

To the jagged skerries beneath your lighthouse walls

Looming blue and white and beautiful with arabesques

I can still smell your perfume through this brackish haze

It mixes with the salt into some ambiguous alchemy, obscuring want

Thick upon a leaden compass skewed

By the precarious lodestone locked behind your eyes

The Lightning from Your Lips

I want to kiss the lightning from your lips

Feel the thunder of this storm crash into our abdomens

Leave a giant purple stain across my ego

In a shade more endearing than the gray before

Necrotic with the marks of countless fingernail regrets

Put to rest upon my wan moonlight bed

And slide fingers into the vortex of your pleasure

Pull the orgasm of your eyes down into your belly

Warm, soft, and supple as the stars it shines

My appendages cold and rough with calluses of want

With a pink afterglow I pull away and rest my head

Light with the airs of contentment thick upon my brow

As I slip upon you, a figure ivory, carved and marble

As soft as the finest Chinese silk brought across long roads

By the Sound of God

And this is the sound of god touching

The sky of your mind with his fists, cracking

“Who are you? Where did you come from? Where are you going?”

The synthesizer of your soul, detuned

Oscillating, faster, rapid back and forth till the tears

Questions every man is asked not only by himself

In the fabric wrapped gray and still around your head

Shrouded in a mystery of tobacco leaves and desiccated fish

There is a place the thunder will not touch

Beside your bed in the drawer where you keep

Your dull vibrator and bright pink dildo

But also by the Department of Homeland Security

The Poet

His face a mask, built for the theatre

Not the scarlet catharsis of the act

Yet any time he gazes upon you

The weight of his eyes pulls heavy

On the mask’s upturned lips a little more

Cracks spiderweb slowly day by day

A fine dance downward from the gaze

Of the iris to the force of his lips

The Taste of Blueberries

The violet stains of blueberries on your teeth

As true to their colors as the countless

“I love yous” and “I want to fuck yous”

Slipped off your tongue like so many

Raw eggs broken on the edge of the mixing bowl

Shell caught between my teeth, digging

Into yellow gums receding

Thoughts Ephemeral

A cold flame licks tepidly at my

thalamus and hazy, distended memories

Reflected on brittle glass statuary, its orange

shattering into countless facades

A fraying, tangled spool of thread tumbles from my

hands onto cracked and yellowed linoleum

It catches on a tightly coiled spring, so coated

in rust that it cannot budge without a tragedy

Fingernails coated with a fine layer of salt, an irritant

to my red, cracked cuticles and gums

A dry and brittle piece of driftwood sits discarded by

the empty shores adorning my backyard

In the distance rocky outcrops jut ominously from

the water and its endless tide receding

While fog cascades downwards from

the mountains of my birth, washing and obscuring

On the Modernity of Life in Numbers

Stifled beneath a mountain of digital readouts I struggle

for air as my lungs are filled with pecuniary fibers

I grasp desperately for any handhold, hoping for a quick exit

But every flash of red I see is not an exit sign, just another readout

I built this hollow facsimile of Ryugyong these many years

But I am not an architect

And these damned handholds I designed are far too precarious

Even without their tendency to crumble as clay beneath my weight

Beneath my grasping digits and stuttered breaths

Smothered by this overbearing mountain of regret and concrete

I somehow built myself of integers and symbols

I had never stopped to look at the alignment of the elevator shafts

And these damned numbers for the handholds are all wrong

Cement Geese

Adulterous housewives behave as homely fuckmakers

Inviting studs dripping with machismo beneath naked sheets

And Betty Crocker buttfucking in the kitchen next to the stove

Pounding out ham in between hot folds of schnitzel

Draped with a thick white slab of Swiss in the middle

Pounding out and in again until she’s got that cordon bleu

And puts it all away in her hidden place while she goes to get the kids

Meanwhile the business-suit-happy husband prowls in his car, on his mobile

Abandoning his semblance of static domesticity for the wooden

Mask of a nomadic shark, circulating turgid waters

Waiting for some naïve chum to fall down through the liquor currents

He abandons the last metal bonds tying down his homely consciousness

* * * * *

He goes back to his family for the evening

Pats his empty children on their brittle clay heads

And kisses his wife’s semen-filled cheeks good night

From a Mojito

Your breath is sharp as mint

on the edges of my mind’s desire

Mingled with the softly fizzing water

playing on the edges of your tongue

Cool as ice upon my lips your eyes

caress the fervors of my longing

The thickly saccharine syrup of your gaze

snagging my attentions staid

Ideas burn hotly like a Cuban rum

as I swallow every sense of you

And bitter as lime the knowledge

I cannot have this love in kind

On Loss

I

Like cracked glass my tears fall

Heavy as the teeth against my cheeks, enamel chipped

On the anvil of my fears I may not see you again

II

These tawny dunes soak up

The physicality of my time

As my dust-hand wisps towards her

III

Your hands and teeth and nails and tongue may dry and split

But you will always be ready to take a trip to Wakulla in my mind

IV

The dying chemicals of a photograph fade slowly to a blurry mess

Then the memory of the film itself severs from our consciousness

Leaving an empty artifact with no Rosetta Stone

V

My tears fall still like shattered glass

From the recesses of my fears against the anvil of my loss

Like cold water on hot glass they crack again

VI

The oxygen tank clanging against your hospital bed

Like some medieval death knell as they wheel you

Down the hall, it is the only sound I hear

Stairs

Hairs splitting and boots knocking on tile
Cold with the first falls of autumn
Men made of barley knock on thick, wooden doors
Behind which our teeth chatter incessantly
On grape seeds and tomato pills

Fabric striped stretches between shoulder
Blades numb with impassion

She goes down the stairs one at a time
Same as always, dust puffs up
Beneath her heels spiders and crickets run

The ingrown follicles of a million words
Dot your tongue like thick taste buds
Scarlet stems struggling to sprout from each of them

Away from the tree in which I've built
My home erect against hurricane winds
But roots brittle, starved for salivating
A crow's nest atop its limbs from where
I can watch you leave the stairs

The Poppy Blossom

A poppy blossomed from my lover's chest
So I got my gardening gloves, my gardening shears
And snapped it off at the sternum

In our musty dirt-cellar I ground the seeds
Chased my lover through saccharine dreams

We were on top of a hill when I put each foot
In front of the other simultaneously and jumped
Forward, across and over the tops of pines,
Landed on a rock plateau and snapped my toothpick bones,
Starting with my ankles and ricocheting upward

Until my neck turned to jelly and bent sharply forward.
The dead weight pulled until the skin of my neck
Snapped in two like toffee pulled thin by bickering children.

My head came to a rest in her sternum's cavity
Where the poppy stem and roots had rotted, making way
For beetles, nightcrawlers, and my lilting tongue.

The Rules of Poetry

I
Thoughts do not come often in streams
But fragment, tangentially and otherwise
Ramming their prows against each other's confines
In fits and starts they form and stop
Like the shards of a gemstone menagerie
Some clear as photons pass through them unabsorbed
Some cool and blue like the depths of the Keys
And others absorbing every photon into a sheen of white madness

II

Death comes in a monocle and sex in a top hat, raging from the id
Coming toe to toe with my condoms and a dialysis machine
Dispatched from the superego to fight my pugilistic ego
Red, slippery, and supple yet firm like Carolina clay

III

One should always come prepared for the overarching etiquette
Ever-present and effervescent  in any social situation
"Should I wear a colon, or is that too revealing?
How about this scarlet semicolon? Bold and exotic, yet reserved"

Consumption (edit)

This too is actually not a piece of writing, but also a video project on YouTube.

Consumption (edit)

New York Cincinnati Banal Conversation (Culture Drop mix)

This actually isn't a piece of writing, but a video piece I did once and is on YouTube.

New York Cincinnati Banal Conversation (Culture Drop mix)

Right About the Bend at the Dogwood Tree

Little Jimmy ran on down towards the gas station

Down the dirt road from his home to the store

To buy some sticks of sweet candy he loved

Right about the bend at the dogwood tree

Little Jimmy ran straight on into suave Marie

She stood there with the sun shining high behind her

The dust from the road all stirred up on her stockings

“Little Jimmy, little Jimmy, why you runnin’ down here?”

She crooned as he stopped and stared at her hard

From the tops of her shoulders right down to her knees

Was a deep blue dress as dark as could be

“To the store, Ms. Marie, to get me my treat!”

“Oh Jimmy, oh Jimmy, you’ve no need to buy that

Come on down to my place and I’ll get you a snack

Free of charge, free from me, as sweet as can be!”

She ran from that tree, through the field, and looked back

Little Jimmy followed hard but a foot from her heels

They ran on through the woods, past the hills

Until they stopped winded at the porch to Marie’s

Feet slapping on wood they’d came to a halt

And she grabbed Jimmy’s hand, dove through the door

Past the hallway, past the den, and into her kitchen

Marie came up short and gave Jimmy a chair

“Now you just wait here while I get in the pantry

And dig up that sweet snack that’s tickled your fancy”

Jimmy sat and he waited as he heard a great clatter

He toyed with a knife left out on the counter

And his hunger grew deeper and thicker

“Oh Jimmy, come here,” he heard from the pantry

“I just can’t get this damn snack down from here!”

He put the knife down and leapt to the larder

Marie’s deep blue dress lay down on the floor, unattended

And there in the back, by the shelves with some jars

She stood in her stockings and dusty black shoes

Hair falling vermillion past her ears and her shoulders

He stared at her wondering, lost in supple confusion

Syrup spilled down her breasts, past her belly to her pussy

“Little Jimmy, oh Jimmy, I’ve found your sweet succor

But it slipped and it spilled through the neck of my dress,

If you want, you can have it, but have it off me”

Jimmy picked up her dress and sniffed it for syrup

Found none, threw it down, and jumped on Marie

Ran his tongue ‘cross her chest and down ‘round her belly

Pushing back, pushing hard, she was sweeter than jelly

She squealed, held him close, leaned back on the shelves

Jimmy slipped, held her tight, and pushed on her harder

From her back came a snap and a crash all a sudden

Marie gasped suddenly, felt a rush and penetration

Jimmy licked, tasted blood, pulled back in concern

Saw the wood through her chest, making syrup vermilion

He backed through the door and ran from her pantry

Poor Marie stood there dazed, morose in her stockings

Slowly slid off the wood that stuck from her bosom

Wandering all alone, dripping blood through the kitchen

She knocked some eggs from the counter and got to the phone

Called an ambulance and slumped down to the floor

Waiting all dusty in her shoes and red stockings

Canopic Jars

My organs were displaced by you, one by one
Set aside, measured and weighed for different qualities
Like some feminine Anubis you quantified them:
"This one tubercular, this one sweet"
A saccharine death in every ounce put upon your scales
I felt every pulse dwindling in them, one by one
As they were left to be stored in my mind's canopic jars
Sealed with a lock and key so dense I could not swallow them
Even if I had the stomach for it

The Blister

While I wasn't looking a blister sprouted on my right big toe
Thick with pus like murky water, turgid
On the ridge of the joint, stiff with skin and hair

I took a needle to the blister, lanced it
Watched the ichor spill into the ridges and down the side

Clear of filth the wound stared back into my eyes
A sickly white flesh revealed beneath
Rotten like a fish left out beneath a Southern sun

Lacking the taut blister skin to hold the rot together
Slowly the pit spread back from itself and split
Down to the bone holding the blasted thing together
Stretching slowly to the bottom of my toe
Until its sweet putrescence rest in two

If I Would Wish

To make ripples

To ripple through the eons

To smack up hard against the back side of the universe

Like a sordid piece of chicken, raw

Would a bodhisattva hear me?

Or laugh with a clanging of necklaces and bracelets

While I sank into a boggy mire

Clutching the blossom of a lotus to my chest 

The City

Telephone wires set against the wizened trees and red

brick of unfinished city blocks.  Birds fall out

of bushes, onto frozen puddles, flapping their brown wings,

dusty with winter.  The asphalt plies through ice

at children’s feet, but cannot grip their soles.

* * * * *

A wind-snapped scarf tackles a trashcan spilling over

receipts and discarded fast food.  A cigarette scatters

ash as it tumbles, and a man chases it a few feet

before stopping, answering his phone—

a sparrow meekly twitters from a telephone pole.

On Loss

Like cracked glass my tears fall

Heavy as the teeth against my cheeks, enamel chipped

On the anvil of my fears I may not see you again

These tawny dunes soak up

The physicality of my time

Oysters on the Beach

Serrated oysters carouse across beaches

Made of sharply cut glass and dildos

Honed on the scrimshaw of a thousand years

The walrus lurches forward on fat-laden haunches

“Oh please, oh please, cut my bristles for me!”

He cries as he throws his bulk on the surf

Searching with his tusks for the teats of Lady Blue Water

With a great slap and a crash a humpback comes up

Displacing such froth as only a whale can

The dodos and the pelicans, the gulls and the shits

All stare in wonder at the diamonds in the froth

And afar on a cliff from a tower made of stone

The last watcher stares out with nary a drone

From his pipe, hot and long, he breathes deep and sighs

Settles in the armchair his father despised

Lifts a book, dull and gray, with a dangerous smell

And slips between the pages—

The Complex Case of Dorothy Vallens

The character of Dorothy Vallens, brilliantly portrayed by Isabella Rossellini in David

Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, is a woman stuck in a complex predicament with various male figures circling around her, with her essentially powerless to change things for herself.  The malicious Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, is a gangster who is holding Dorothy’s husband and son hostage as leverage to keep Dorothy Vallens singing at a night club, and as his sex slave.  Meanwhile, innocent college boy Jeffrey Beaumont, as played by Kyle MacLachlan, has been snooping into her life in an attempt to solve the mystery of a severed ear he found in a field.  His search results in him being stuck in the living room closet of Dorothy Vallens’ apartment, witnessing Frank abuse and rape her while Frank is high on nitrous.  Trapped in this tortuous situation, Dorothy Vallens becomes the epitome of a woman trapped in the maelstrom of a patriarchal system swirling uncontrollably around her.

            This is clearly a situation in which a woman is being sexually exploited by the two key men around her.  Although Frank’s relation to her is the most obviously sexual from his bizarre rape of her, the act of voyeurism as focused through Jeffrey is in itself a sexual act.  It may begin as an attempt to unravel the mystery of the severed ear he found in a field, but Jeffrey does not have to spy on the acts of Frank and Dorothy while trapped in her closet.  Instead of shying away from what is going on in Dorothy’s living room, or simply overhearing what Frank is doing to her, Jeffrey intentionally stares at them through the slats of the closet.  It is in this act that Jeffrey becomes a willful sexual participant, exploiting the misery of Dorothy to satisfy his own libidinal curiosity.

            Even when Dorothy attempts to take control of the sexual morass in which she has become entrenched, she has become so indoctrinated that she cannot help but victimize herself.  Jeffrey initially hides in the living room closet when Dorothy comes home, and it is before Frank arrives that he accidentally reveals himself.  Frightened, Dorothy grabs a large knife from the kitchen and forces Jeffrey out of her closet at its point.  The elongated knife is a phallic symbol, representing Dorothy’s attempt to take over the patriarchal role she has come to associate with dominance.  Assuming that Jeffrey’s motive could be nothing but sexual, she decides that he must make a habit of hiding in women’s closets in the hopes of seeing them undress.  In her attempt to subvert the dominance she is used to being at the receiving end of, she tells Jeffrey to instead undress for her, to which he responds that all he wants is to leave.  “No way, I want to see you get undressed!” Dorothy screams at him while forcibly pointing the phallic knife at his face.  She then forces Jeffrey onto her sofa, where she begins to coax him into some sort of sexual scenario, but is interrupted by the arrival of Frank before it can go anywhere.  It is this point at which Jeffrey enters her closet again and becomes the willing, voyeuristic participant in Frank’s abuse of Dorothy.  After her rape, Dorothy lies helpless on the floor until Jeffrey comes out to comfort her.  Her previous attempt at dominance over Jeffrey completely shattered by the forceful entry of a male, her attempt to coax Jeffrey into a sexual situation with her at this point is now subservient, and descends into her pleading for Jeffrey to hit her.  What began as an attempt on Dorothy’s part to overturn the patriarchy around her has been completely reversed, no matter how ardent her attempt.

            As mentioned before, Frank’s dominance over Dorothy extends beyond his control of her directly, as he has extended this dominance over the other men in her life.  Frank is the embodiment of hyper-masculinity, doing drugs and raping women as he pleases, all the while exerting his control over the men around him, keeping them in line as an alpha male will dominate the other males of his species he comes in contact with.  He has kidnapped both Dorothy’s husband and son, directly showing her that there is no room in her life for any man other than him.  He then uses the well-being of her family as a way to keep her from bringing any other men into her life in an attempt to challenge his role.  Moreover, Dorothy is forced to keep her job as a singer at a nightclub, an arena in which other men may be allowed to view what Frank has claimed as his own, while being completely unable to challenge his ownership.  In this scenario Dorothy cannot help but wish for something more, even if she cannot define it herself, in effect desiring nothing and the desire existing unto itself since it is not something Frank has defined for her.  “As the embodiment of desire, Dorothy draws men to her.  They want to discover the secret of her desire, what it is that she wants, and the fact that she wants nothing, that nothing can satisfy her, compels them all the more” (McGowan 99).  In his desire to control not only Dorothy but the men around her, this tantalizing inaccessibility plays directly into Frank’s controlling desires, and in turn transforms Dorothy into a focal point for the interplay of male-female desire.

            One of the more idiosyncratic elements of Frank’s twisted relationship with Dorothy is his fetishistic need to have her act as a mother to him, while he unravels an oedipal need to fantasize that he is having sex with his mother.  Frank mutters “mommy” and tells her that “baby wants to fuck” before slipping into a primal rage seated somewhere in his id and lets out an expletive-ridden, violent rant about fucking.  Meanwhile, Jeffrey lives out his own oedipal fantasy as he hides in Dorothy’s closet and watches Frank’s violent acts upon her.  “Many have indeed noticed the Freudian elements of this scene: Jeffrey like a child has beheld the primal scene—sex between his parents” (Wilson 69).  Both Frank and Jeffrey are then complicit in forcibly rewriting Dorothy’s familial relationships in the absence of her actual husband and son.  The fact these relationships are being forced upon Dorothy by an outside system is emphasized by the twisted nature in which Jeffrey and Frank have become affiliated with her.  Frank is acting as the son in his sexual relationship with her, while he is as a father in Jeffrey’s sexual relation to her.  This creates another dichotomy in terms of Jeffrey’s relationship to Dorothy, as he is as the son in relation to his own voyeurism, but also as a brother to Frank in that they both act like a son in each of their sexual relationships to Dorothy.  Meanwhile, Dorothy is then constantly forced into acting as both a mother and a wife in terms of the men focusing around her. 

            Jeffrey Beaumont, in his boyish innocence, largely acts as a foil to Frank Booth’s exaggerated hyper-masculinity.  He is shown as having no intentions to abuse the women around him in any way; he is simply a young man worried about the well-being of his hometown after his gruesome discovery of a severed ear.  From this well-intentioned curiosity begins Jeffrey’s downfall and subsequent gradual indoctrination into the patriarchal system surrounding him.  After finding the ear, he goes directly to the sheriff for help, and it is from this initial request of a patriarchal figure to right things that Jeffrey begins to become a man in the system, slowly losing his boyhood innocence.  From his visits to the sheriff Jeffrey becomes friends with the sheriff’s daughter Sandy Williams, played by Laura Dern, who is in her senior year of high school.  After bonding over their mutual curiosity of where the ear in the field came from and following leads based on what Sandy has overheard her father saying, the two fall for each other in what is a mutually respectful relationship.  However, at a certain point Jeffrey begins to clearly take over the investigation, robbing Sandy of any authority, and he ends up being the one in Dorothy’s apartment, which leads to his involvement with the relationship between Dorothy and Frank.  As detailed before, Jeffrey then becomes caught up in the patriarchal abuse of Dorothy, which for him also extends into a patriarchal abuse of Sandy.  He refuses to let her in on his sexual experiences in the apartment and tries to keep her outside of it, while not in any way trying to cut off his blossoming relationship with Sandy.  As such, Jeffrey proceeds to abuse his position as a trusted male figure and keeps up a sexual relationship with Dorothy while further developing one that is romantic with Sandy. 

Eventually the extreme of masculinity in Dorothy’s life overtakes Jeffrey’s attempts to maintain a position of control around the women in his life, as Frank discovers that there is some sort of relationship between Jeffrey and Dorothy.  He then takes Jeffrey on a joy ride with Dorothy and his cronies, during which he forces Jeffrey to first be a voyeur of various criminal activities before directly asserting his and his pack’s dominance over Jeffrey through physical violence.  Jeffrey is shaken, but he still attempts to maintain control over what he can in his life by focusing on his role as a dominant male figure to Sandy.  Although his curiosity is not completely abated by his run-in with Frank, he is unwilling to listen to Sandy’s advice that he should drop the case, but is willing to attempt to drop it once her father steps in and advises him to do so. 

He then focuses completely on Sandy until Dorothy violently forces herself back into his life with a sudden appearance at Sandy’s parent’s house while he is there.  At this point his dominant role begins to slip again and the sheriff intervenes once again to straighten things out, but Jeffrey cannot help but try and prove himself to Sandy and solve the case, so he heads off to catch Frank on his own.  This leads to a game of cat and mouse in which Frank’s hyper-masculinity again overrides Jeffrey, and it is only with yet another intervention by the sheriff that Jeffrey comes out unscathed.  In short, Jeffrey is a young male attempting to inherit the power of the patriarchy in fits and starts after unintentionally becoming introduced to the system of power associated with it.

Dorothy Vallens may be far from the typical figure of a subservient woman because of the forcible manner in which she is consumed by the men around her, but her relationships with Frank Booth and Jeffrey Beaumont both reveal that she is at least as much a victim of patriarchy as a suburban housewife, if not more so.  David Lynch may not attempt to subvert the patriarchy with Blue Velvet, but his caricatures are apt depictions of how the patriarchal system rips apart the traditional American family rather than supporting it.  Dorothy Vallens, who might have been a happy, strong woman with her husband and son, has been reduced to a self-victimizing object at the hands of the hyper-masculine gangster Frank Booth.  Jeffrey Beaumont is an innocent college youth falling for an equally innocent high-school senior named Sandy Williams in a relationship that begins on equal footing, until Jeffrey is suddenly plunged into the dark heart of the patriarchal system when he is a given a key (the severed ear) to learning the depravity of Frank and Dorothy’s relationship.  Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Sandy may have lived relatively peaceful lives if it weren’t for the intrusion of Frank as the alpha male, and as such the audience is aware that the happy scene at the end of the film, with all three relaxing in a pristine, small-town, American household, is but a fallacy belying the dark truth of their pasts and the system from which they have been born.

Works Cited

McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Wilson, Eric G. The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to

Mulholland Dr. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Frustration

He bites down on the ropes and pulls hard

to starboard:

He sees the ocean in his blindfold

but cannot tilt his ship to any side, lashed

to the wheel in the middle of this desert

He tastes salt on his lips, through his nose:

It is but brackish flakes shaken

off her cracked and dying sails

Old St. George

There is nothing so strange as the death of art

by flames fanned with the cold of winter

as history’s embers fall into the littered street

Livid greens and dying yellows fade to throbbing red;

No smoke is in our lungs, the air is rushing elsewhere

and we wait, we wait as stained glass shatters—

The air is taut with whispers on sticky tongues: “Will it fall?

Will there be nothing tomorrow but some ash and a bell?”