Ajapajapam (Or Something Close)- third draft

Mild-eyed Euryphaessa has birthed

nigh on seventy-four full-formed far-winged daughters

since last we basked in the glow of the perfect pitch

of her favored kin and her consort that night, star-fathering Astraios.

But we have always foregone the horological

invocations of our old dead predecessors.

We wrote our masterworks in fiery touch

when we were still the kids we claim to keep alive;

we seared with fingers a thousand odes across our ribs,

as many sonnets in the smalls of our backs,

and 'canted glorious hymns down each others' throats.

As we sang to each other then, modulating our natural harmonies,

you bit my lip, not for the first time.

Do you remember? I bled, just a bit. You called it purification.

You told me it was my self-punishment for an imagined sin,

then apologized for any suffering I caused myself. You cried

for just an instant, the pale cold oceanic salt blur hitting your own lips

in one of those too-perfect movie moments you loved to hate to love.

You shared that moment with me, the mutual sting of sodium and iron

jumpstarting our youthful frames, and we toppled back to our bed of Mayan

blanket, crumpled clothes, and discarded skin cells.

The night's cycle began anew, birthing the stuff

from which details are later selected, rejected,

detested, rejoiced, and, ultimately, retold.

Slowly, though, we burned through our hours,

and dawn crested her first fierce glare over the horizon-line.

You swore against her, at first under your breath, then screaming exposed her

for the thieving whore she proved to be. You promised (though to whom,

I now would ask) that this night would not be our last.

Your tears this time were not momentary, but a pathos-flood

of embittered rage and choked grief the force of which

brought me to likened lows. With deepest hesitation we parted,

and with sorrow deeper yet we have passed these years apart;

the creep and lurch of time inevitably brought

the quelling of our flames, the rasping of our throats,

the far-flinging end of our prodigious union.

I'm told it was Osiris and his gods of the Nile

who blew us seven-hundred-some miles apart, but

we always screamed youth's empassioned defiance

to whoever was listening once we fell, panting, sweat-slicked,

apart. Do you remember? We rejected the printed page

as the passive empty delusion of an age

that has lost its connection with the fundamental Chaos

by which our lives have always been tethered.

And here I am, writing of you. Writing not in the

ears or flesh of those who came after, not in

the long languorous spirals of skin-against-skin,

but in short rapid keystrokes devoid of meaning

and frozen in intent, frozen in the permanence

that we denied as devolutions of our human spirits.

Here I am, writing of you, not speaking with you,

not revelling in your passion; you were always the better me.

Even then, six years ago to the day, under that nigh-empty sky,

you were all I strove to be. Tonight, the moon is full.

You know, that night, the moon was just past new,

but we couldn't hardly care. We were more like children then,

together, and we had full moons of our own. We danced in

the moonless black, and even Astraios took his gracious leave;

our revelry was our own that night, six years ago to the day.

Our roadside field has been razed repeatedly since then-

controlled burns, wildfires, arson. I know what you'd say.

Erase the past. Destroy it utterly. Forget there

ever was a past. Recall only what is to come, and then forget that.

Confabulate if anything must be said- keep the symbols and

the signs, but honor the meager truth with improvements

by the infinite fancies of time, honor those long-ago songs

with new refrains bettered by the palliative of age.

But shades of reverie have often across the six-year expanse

grimly visited with infectious ire the still-opened gash,

though now in repose I find again the troubling pull of reflection,

from which, this time, comes not that wallowing in grief which

you predicted with your angry shouts to the rising sun

(and which has come in every retrospective reverie yet),

but the returning vestiges of ecstatic wonder that do not dampen

current spirits, but inspire to greater heights the efforts of future exploits.

(copyright a(scetic)verse March 09 2010)

Ajapajapam (Or Something Close)- second draft

Mild-eyed Euryphaessa has birthed

nigh on seventy-four full-formed far-winged daughters

since last we basked in the glow of the perfect union

of her favored kin and her consort that night, star-fathering Astraios.

We have always foregone the horological

incantations of our old dead predecessors;

we wrote our masterpieces in fiery touch

back when we were still the kids we claim to keep alive,

we seared with fingers odes across our ribs,

sonnets in the smalls of our backs,

sang glorious hymns down each others' throats.

I'm told it was Osiris and his gods of the Nile

who blew us seven-hundred-some miles apart, but

we always screamed youth's defiance and death

to whoever was listening after we fell, panting, sweat-slick, apart.

Do you remember? We rejected the printed page

as the passive empty delusion of an age

that has lost its connection with the principle of Chaos

by which our lives have always been tethered.

And here I am, writing of you. Writing not in the

ears or flesh of those who came after, not in

the long languorous spirals of skin-against-skin,

but in short rapid keystrokes devoid of meaning

and frozen in intent, frozen in the permanence

that we denied as devolutions of the human spirit.

Here I am, writing to you, not speaking to you,

not revelling in your passion; you were always the better me.

Six years to the day, and the moon is full.

You know, that night, the moon was just past new,

but we didn't care. We were more like children then - together -

and we had full moons of our own. We danced in

the moonless black, and even Astraios had taken his leave;

our revelry was our own that night, six years ago to the day.

The roadside field has been razed repeatedly since then-

controlled burns, wildfires, arson. I know what you'd say.

Erase the past. Destroy it entirely. Forget there

ever was a past. Recall only what is to come. Then forget that.

Confabulate if anything must be said- keep the symbols and

the signs, but honor the meager truth with improvements

by the infinite fancies of time.

As we sang to each other, modulating our natural harmonies,

you bit my lip, not for the first time.

Do you remember? I bled, just a bit. You called it purification.

You told me it was my self-punishment for an imagined sin,

then apologized for any suffering I caused myself. You cried

for just an instant, the pale cold oceanic salt blur hitting your own lips

in one of those too-perfect movie moments you loved to hate to love.

You shared that moment with me, the mutual sting of sodium and

iron

jumpstarting our youthful frames, and we toppled back to our bed of

Mayan

blanket, crumpled clothes, and discarded skin cells.

The night's cycle began anew, birthing the stuff

from which details are later selected, rejected,

detested, rejoiced, and, ultimately, retold.

Now in recall I find not the wallowing of grief you

predicted with your angry shouts to the rising sun,

but the vestiges of ecstatic wonder that do not dampen current spirits,

but inspire to greater heights the efforts of future exploits.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, March 01, 2010)

On Hipsters

These sun-starved soul-sick lonely vagrant boys

commit themselves to only blank pages;

the words they spill, they leave as only ploys;

they say their verses are their own cages,

but each vagrant boy in silence rages

against his tepid urges and passions.

The settling dust accrues across ages,

atop each book, designed after fashions,

as each vagrant boy takes drugs as rations,

and calls himself a maker of the truth.

What use could they make of sweet compassion's

warm touch? For they are the world's uncouth,

adrift and wayward, cast to sea, lost in

dreamy tarnished glory, and far too thin.

Marching Song

My person out of many people grew,

steeped hot in many climes of human thought;

of their best parts, as Pallas born anew,

fresh from their forge, my better self was wrought.

In caution's clasp my fancies were arrest,

lost but for verse's sweet escape from flesh,

'til their many characteristics blest

enraptured verse which with their strength enmeshed.

What lies inside the secret hearts of men,

which little keys the light of day doth bring!

How harsh the burn, how fierce the field! But then,

how sweet the day, and too, how right the sting.

Parades of youth to tides of time are lost,

but change's mark is on my soul embossed.

Oneiroic Ode

Awakened I with some slight im-

perfection rent from Sleep's sweet shadow realm,

haloed 'round with vision, song, and storm, and him,

smoky, bright Morpheus, sand, and cloak, and helm.

Prophetic cries burst from him of fancy and dread,

graven portentious dream things of sleep and rest!:

"Wake ye not, die ye not, for the middle places are the bed

of human want and human need. 'tis best

to 'void low depths. Sleep's realm has idylls vast.

Soporific veils may cast on thy soul

a pallor which life nary at first hast,

but this pallor's peace make thee at last whole.

Find in my dream palace your own wide berth,

create for thee thy own true human worth."

Doing Lines

Layover in O'Hare,
just a quick jaunt from
one plane to another.
No more than twenty minutes,
vast hordes of us do it
every day.

-

zephyr threw a glance
in our direction as
the branches chattered
their derision, drowning
the gentle sussurus of
breath and skin-against-skin,
but that brief notice
of our deviant bliss
was all the world cared
to muster, the enormity
of our shared sphere

-

Drunk enough I'm sweating rice
in this Harajuku hell.

-

The winter and the people
seem a little colder here,
lost as I am
in the midst of boulevards
and avenues named after fruits.
What will our descendants,
a thousand years from now,
think of us when they see
the products of our ubiquity,
the likeliest signs of us to remain,
our chalk hopscotch boards,
our crayoned walls, our
hand-outlined festive turkeys,
our ten-thousand-piece puzzles,
the closest things to art our housewives
will ever achieve?

(copyright a(scetic)verse, January 03, 2010)

Observations 1

father, carrying infant
12-gauge plugs in
both ears.
the four-leaf clover tattoo
on his left elbow
matches his shirt.
green's a good color
on him.
he's too hot for his wife, though,
whose thighs are each,
individually, wider than my torso.

what's an inverted hourglass called?
one where the top and bottom
are the thinnest points
and the middle is the widest?
well anyways she was wearing
a shirt that said "you'll never get over me"
but maybe it should have said
"you'll never get around me"
because she took up the whole sidewalk.
maybe if i was shorter i could walk under
her hips. maybe i could shove her
but even if i could overcome her center
of gravity, i don't have the cash
to pay the property damages.

green apron
reindeer antlers
flapping his arms like wings.
i come here too much,
so i'm not really surprised, anymore.
maybe he's like a walmart greeter;
i've never seen him make a drink.

he wants to take me out
to dinner and get to know me,
but he's wearing paisley and he
lost his bangs in the war. he gave
me his card; i guess i'll tell him
i didn't mean to stare, it's just
that i'm paranoid-schizophrenic
and the giant insect legs sprouting
out of his back kinda freaked me out.
i hope he'll understand the mix-up, 'cause
this kind of thing happens to me all the time.
i just can't see myself with a kafka-esque monstrosity.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, November 22, 2009)

Mistaken Identity

I am not simply
the sum of my
many mistakes,
though I hope
that in this,
for once,
I am not mistaken.
The proportion
approaches too closely
one to one.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, November 22, 2009)

The Resting

The red clay will one day
swallow up my gunnysack
of meat and sticks. Who could cry
about this everyday thing?
Who finds it sad when old friends reunite?
When twos become ones? Besides-
there are no drunk uncles who want to
hit me or put themselves in me,
sweating and furious with themselves,
under the red clay or brown dirt or green grass
or any other place I'm apt to lay.

I want to say that I will end up
in the ground safe from uncles
and hellhounds and hate. But 'end up' is not
quite right- I'll stay in that bright red clay for a
night or two and then I'll turn to dust or soil
and, with the turning of the earth, will traipse away
into the void. We got these forms from the hearts
of dying stars, you know,
and I'm a good boy so someday
soon I'll give mine back. That's good
sharing; we learned it when we were kids.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, Jan 03, 2010)

a first kiss

A First Kiss

She had always wondered, ever since she first paddled to the middle of the lake towards the end of summer in her third year of vacation here, how many bodies the police have had to pull from this particular lake. The hazy quality of light had always raised in her a certain melancholy, an introspective awareness of not just her own mortality, and it was no different then, set adrift as she was on an ancient, sturdy wooden raft in what was roughly the center of the lake, nothing but that raft and her hands and a battered copy of "The Weary Blues" and the crust of a peanut-butter and raspberry jam sandwich to keep her company.

People in this mindset, she had read, often felt a certain compulsion to organize, to make orderly, to straighten, to tidy up. She had always been the sort to make the best of what she had, and so she aligned the crusts with the slants of the topmost layer of wood, laid the book open in perfectly-squared orientation at the center of the raft, which, when she settled again, resembled a floating altar, Arthur's place of meeting with his Lady of the Lake. Her own place of remembrance for those she imagined had died here.

The copse at the shore over her shoulder stood its silent watch, cloaked in the early morning fog and mist which had settled around the stoic wardens. She knew it must be lonely, guarding this lake for the half-century or more that the trees had grown in their inexorable upward climb. She felt something like that, that she had grown amongst a pack of others growing just the same, but that she was ever apart, that she was as thickly-skinned as the oaks lining the shore. Their roots drank from the soil goblet, constantly draining the ever-replenished vessel. She felt that craving. She was empty, parched. As she cast her gaze back to the raft, she caught sight of Hughes' words, wound tight and brief like a viper ready to strike:

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

And the words sang to her. The water's voice enticed her. And she was parched. And she had never been asked for a kiss before. The romance was brief, as the best of summer are. But she felt safe, wrapped in the warm clear kiss of the lake. The pain too was brief; waves of euphoria supplanted her sense of shock, the initial terror of something so new undermined by the pleasure of belonging, of acceptance. For perhaps the first time she felt truly in good company, proud to share this magic with those who led her here, who captured her imagination, who brought her to such a tender and devoted lover as her lake.

Her brother told the police what he knew of her fascination with the isolated forest shrine. They dredged the lake, then, for the first time in the town's history, and brought up a lone, swollen corpse.