Part One
Nascent Craving

The insular heart unsealed; pearled eyes
Breach parapets of stone— periled shield,
The sweetest ****—
A threatening wonder and irrefragable synergy,
Nervous routes of cognition  
In this nascent, amorous craving.
Locked and abased,
Dissonance lends pathos — euphoric and onerous,
Disconsolate cries curb sublimation,
The regnant bleed diffusing — fervid lust
Fondled, tactile surfaces in throbbing anticipation.

Sullen, aft a veil of laughter,
Visceral aftermath, out of
The ardent ash,
Burns a thirst;
Insuperable numbness and ache.
Efflorescent intimacy,
Table for two
Enraptured in new alliance,
Élan vital (psyche);
Urgent dialect petitions
Equivocation, jocularity blending
Provocation with indecision,
Noted lilt of descending inhibition.

Adrift, the incessant Now;
As occasion inexorably diminished;
Resonant simpatico tending,
Numinous amity;
Heard conversant, cognitive idioms—
Lassitude, time-eaten pangs of the unhinged heart,
Wounds axiomatic,
In disquieting synergy,
Nibbling, the circumference—
Misery’s permeating truth;
None immune, all trundle incongruously past,
Facing intrepid savages.

Licitly felt, reverberations of Amor
Whence the heart behaves;
Measured cadence, pulse elevating—
Treasured lover, contemplative muse;
Undulating clasp, inflated bone of absence;
Incarnation — a woman,
Beyond prosaic;
Ineffable adoration pours in certitudes of verse,
Elenita, enclothed —virtue unvarnished;
Reservoir intrinsic, poised advocate of the innocent:
The crooked lines of insolence,
Brazen culture of neglected youth.
Perceptive blue stare, sensitized tears—
Plaintively, evincing her injustice ago.

Part Two
Tendered Senses

Siren silence, eruptive blush, ampler between phrases
In dulcet tones — stirring discourse;
Foments rebellion, the strife beneath— his ****,
Out of its vast reserve,
Penetrate the narrowed ambit, vaguely announced.
Groping hands, migrating the sensual member
Stern faces grimacing— mirror in abrasion,
Under the blind surf of consent;
Burrowing ambiguity, emerging torsion,
Plunge, enlisted and content in the sea;
Subsumed in the nonverbal cue,
Persuasion’s plea,
Quelled in the post cerebral assent.

Piercing eyes parallel crystalline waters of Lake Tahoe.

An untouched portion of his awareness remains aloof,
Palpable in the subsequential quiet,
Obsequious and febrile, they sinned on sofas;
Peregrine predilections quenched and viscid—
Serenely requited, the room breathes her presence,
Limp, figures *******, mantled in adolescent torpor.

Erudition in bloom, trust undoubted,
Illuminating, satiating; tempest calm—
Under canvas
Terrain soaked and sodden,
Postliminary — rains of invalidation.
Allowance and permission
Recalibrate, salivate, shortly only—
Initiate, obliged consecration, appraising
Curvatures of the spine,
Stuns him obeisant, her femenine pulchritude,
Propinquity inciting vigor,
Emergent allure, the updriven
Tower of wood sprung from the blanket.

Suffused in ether, purring streams of remembrance
Vaginal honeyed dew, sung into
Orchids, remnants of remember;
Drenched down the cynosure of devotion;
Succulent view, diaphanous pantied bottom;
Halcyon mist, saporous wine — compliance of the will,
Freed fires wander,
Pliable rind, twin plums dripping,
Abject confession, dispatching doubt
In tendered senses,
Pivotal tree, lavender Jacaranda holds the key,
Unfurled, cindered vulnerability.

Half-denuded skin invites confessional savor
Acutely bubbled rear, fleshly furnished denim;
Sultry visit, San Ramon Valley in the fall,
Strewed limbs splendid, flowing filmy;
Imagination yields—
Bursting silk congealed
Across deft thighs, ambrosial thong draping ankles,
Grazing ascension, the curvaceous trajectory
Nose inflamed with fragrance,
Inhaling, climb of acquiescence,
The ****** weal, amid the globed fruit,
Focal intention — ploughed lance thrusting,
Absconding, the ancillary perfume of essence.

Perceiving avid validation,
Swimmingly, amid the monstrous gaze.
  
Humid skies simper dank, set swell the incense of Eros,
Surge of poetry engorged
The flame levened shaft,
Nimble ******* flounce, spill the harboring mouth;
Moist hands merging, unfettered,
Weave in supplication,
Vicinity voicing, enmeshed diversion;
Supple and spherical behind
Posterior arch, milky-skin against the lip—
Ripeness jostling their complacency;
Lapped the mooring, ridden decisively;
Recapitulating— spumed forth, bellied over hips warmth.
Abandon the dirge of self-pity
Late under ego’s trance.
  
Part Three
Present Tenses

Tempting trespass across sacred gardens,
Flowering, scandal set luminous: attachment—
Consensual, their corresponsive fear;
Protean manifestations— evocative, perpetual
Unutterable contention in a fictive resolve,
Deliberating the merits of their widely disparate tastes in coffee,
Amorously touring wine, let’s drowse through the gnarled vine.
Sundry deficiencies pale, once contrasted;
The beatific vision—
Material substance unaccompanied,
Imperceptible, tear-streamed cheeks in synch,
Ventral kiss, peak of carnal perfection,
Reminiscence— flesh violent with Love.

Fiction knew to meander the innominate rift,
A tincture of irony soften misdeeds
Immense as the sea.
Insolvent beast stippled with sapience—
Unmasked, the fabric of delusion;
Dependence smothering the disciplined heart
Resentment put up for release.

Waste of residual years
Fate’s apportion, scars bleakly observed;
Chastened by heartache, engulfing fervor
Too faint to recapture.
Vague glimpses dry—
Hypervigilant his defenses,
Veritable suspensions, embers lit linger;
Slender walls of solidity, the horizoned self,
Faith and reason in concert — stone levels of elucidation.

Fractured bones of distance, emanate a rigid salience,
Another ponderous night of absence—
Lingering, cauldron of dearth as indifference ushers,
The quotidian coil of contrition.
Tearful pallor, sequestered —ciphering time and solitude;
The unkissed mouth, his restive brow;
Suspend in the approximate span.
                      
After Lucid alliterations are spoken
Devoid of her face, his lover’s nudge—
The man nurtures his hurt.
Anxious as seldom unscarred,  
Venus’s susurrations,
In present tenses,
Kissed by her serenades of integration—
Notwithstanding metaphysic intrusion,
No chain stays unbroken,
Postponed drifts of deferment left unspoken,
Reverberations of amor.

© 2013 W. S. Warner

The young novelist wrote in his rented room, a claustrophobic nook under the stairwell, where the ceiling sobbed dust each time the owner hurried down to work or hurried up for a forgotten prescription. Shelves crammed with the owner's yearbooks and photo albums lined the walls. He typed at a long oak desk. On which, he had one plant, a gardenia, white flowers in full bloom, and a quote by Buddha on an index card in a four-by-six-inch frame. "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

The sun had quit for the day. He got up and poured out his cold coffee in the bathroom sink across the hall. He dried the mug with a paper towel. Then to the kitchen, where he pressed the button on the box of Merlot, filling the recycled mug. The denouement was coming together. But he hadn't hit his stride, tapped into that secret space where words flow with natural rhythm and proper grace. His hungry or starving or emaciated mother character--he struggled with the diction, the balance between subtlety and a Coca-Cola slinger's criminal word abuse--would decide to eat her baby. Not the ******, the denouement. Critics would **** as only critics could.

He drank one cup of wine while standing in the kitchen then refilled and stepped back into his room. The plant and the Buddha quote were suggestions by his mom. She didn't like him spending so much time alone. Time alone killed her uncle. The young novelist argued it was an indiscriminate heart attack. No, his mother said, it's from all that cheese he would eat. Cheese, his mother contended, was the unitary measure of loneliness, killing you one comforting slice at a time.

Google the symbolism, his mother said of the gardenia.

Secret love.

Oh good.

That's just the first result.

I always loved them.

That was only the first. I bet they're part of the funerary tradition.

Your father used to get them once a year for Pastor Mike. Do you remember that? Around Christmas time. It was your father's way of saying we appreciate your work.

Secret love.

The quote made just about as much sense. A devout--dare he think staunch--Methodist since she was old enough to disagree and berate, his mother's selection of a Buddha aphorism begged suspicion. The young novelist assumed this was an appeal to his academic worldview, a panoramic ideology that protected him from having to value or defend anything, really. Buddhism is **** electronic dance music; Methodism is vaudeville, tired and exploitative. And if his mother was trying to be cool, that disgusted him. But if his mother was trying to meet him halfway, that excited him.

That's it, he thought, the mug now half-empty. The mother is not hungry, not starving, nor emaciated. It's a loving mother. A mother that knows the lows of living. She eats her young in an act of compromise, to protect, to prevent confusion and isolation, hell even Kraft Singles.

He sat and scooted up his chair. He wrote in a fever, a frenetic fictive dream, page by page, scene by scene through the night.

Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
And queen, and of diviner love the day
And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread
Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown
Its venom of renown, and on your head
No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea,
Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum, none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our own imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.

For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all the vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
For this, musician, in your girdle fixed
Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:
The imagination that we spurned and crave.

Nota: his soil is man's intelligence.
That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail?
Hence the reverberations in the words
Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
The more invidious, the more desired.
The florist asking aid from cabbages,
The rich man going bare, the paladin
Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
The appointed power unwielded from disdain.
His western voyage ended and began.
The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,
Another, still more bellicose, came on.
He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
He made a singular collation. Thus:
The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.
And in their music showering sounds intone.
On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,
What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,
What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
That streaking gold should speak in him
Or bask within his images and words?
If these rude instances impeach themselves
By force of rudeness, let the principle
Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

Upon these premises propounding, he
Projected a colony that should extend
To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.
A comprehensive island hemisphere.
The man in Georgia waking among pines
Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,
Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
Should ***** thereof, not on the psaltery,
But on the banjo's categorical gut,
Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.
Sepulchral senors, bibbing pale mescal,
Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
And dark Brazilians in their cafes,
Musing immaculate, pampean dits,
Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,
To be their latest, lucent paramour.
These are the broadest instances. Crispin,
Progenitor of such extensive scope,
Was not indifferent to smart detail.
The melon should have apposite ritual,
Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,
When its black branches came to bud, belle day,
Should have an incantation. And again,
When piled on salvers its aroma steeped
The summer, it should have a sacrament
And celebration. Shrewd novitiates
Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,
Related in romance to backward flights,
However prodigal, however proud,
Contained in their afflatus the reproach
That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
He could not be content with counterfeit,
With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
That must belie the racking masquerade,
With fictive flourishes that preordained
His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree
Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,
Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed
Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.
All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the **** declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

blue stones aligned to be a sign of fictive
internalisation, distanced, wellsprings polluted of genuineness
and consanguinity, remaining true means being incestuous as to acquiesce
to intense reflections of puzzling mechanical motions, predictable
cycles, cluttering, stuttering, dysmorphophobia, beating
being a habit of recommendation, pica, a craving, pleasing finesse
of those at stake, hope and sufferings, scenes of the sun's successive ingress
into Capricorn that are pernicious, indiscriminately
observed, related in a sentiment of losing, a burnoose draping
and draperies, an absence of fear and reverence
for blue light because of an acute awareness
of passing consisting of fits of modesty, escaping
no one's lips, of poshlost or cruelty told with reticence
generously, generous earthly names, unkind fairness

the true republic lies beneath the sea
a single bound will take you straightway there
it's our first homeland where we were born free

look where the master will not let you see
far past the fictive kingdoms of the air
the true republic lies beneath the sea

no effort's needed for each one to flee
just leave right now and be at ease from care
it's our first homeland where we were born free

where we learnt justice at our mother's knee
return' so easy we just have to dare
the true republic lies beneath the sea

not far at all we note the mango tree
the purple bloom the old man on his chair
it's our first homeland where we were born free

the place of order where we long to be
and it is simple to end the affair
the true republic lies beneath the sea
it's our first homeland where we were born free

Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

January 1, 1000

Year One-thousand, January One,
starts the new millennium.
The villein, Jacques, in Reims,
wakes to find his world unchanged.
His hut stinks; his flour's wormy.
He fears God's wrath, but trusts His mercy.
Walled in by his community,
set in Christian certainty;
by their fireplace, with his family, sitting,
he plans the plots he'll plant come spring
The stars above him do not move;
he knows God's power --and His love.

                                                          ­                                        
1118

Others loathe such conformity:
their minds and spirits must be free.
Tutor Pierre finds knowledge increase
in the arms of his pupil Héloise.
Risking life and reputation,
they learn a different conjugation.
(L'Université de Paris's great philosophe
and the canon's niece --in reckless love.)
You think the danger overstated?
Let me remind you that Abélard was castrated
--and the **** confined to a nunnery ...
whence she wrote most eloquently.
("Though I should think of God, I think of thee.")  


225

Dear Francis,
I hear that when you visited St. Peter's
you exchanged clothes with a beggar
and stood all day at the door of the church;
that you asked the people of Gubbio
to be kind to the wolf who was eating their sheep;
that you call birds your "sisters" and fire, your "brother";
that you would have us give all that we own to the poor....
--Perplexed in Perugia

Dear Perplexed,
I ask only that you see God's hand in all creation:
wolf, *****, flower, stone --
God gives to each His rain and His sun.
What man is in the eyes of the Lord,
that I am --and nothing more.


1517

Martin Luther says you can't buy salvation;
the individual conscience is the only true religion.
Of intermediaries, he'll have none;                              
Man is responsible to God alone.
The Bible, being God's holy Word,
must, by each Christian, be read and understood.
Humble toil is a service of God
far surpassing the holiness of monks.
God is terrible in his majesty;
by faith in God, are we made free.  


1611

[London; Shakespeare addresses assembled friends as he
retires to Stratford;... a mysterious stranger rebuts.]

"Despite it surely not being my intention
to slight the worth of imagination,
to doubt the value of our fictive craft,                                          
there can be no question:  in their import,
the actual deeds of actual men
must, perforce, surpass the disembodied pen.
This [pointing] is merely men upon a stage;
these, merely words I've placed on the page."

"Master Shakespeare, I beg to differ:
it is your words which will live forever.
When fiery Phoebus ten million times
has run his course 'round rotund Earth, men will
still be astonished at Lear's great woe,
still sigh with Juliet for her Romeo."


1711

They've placed Monsieur Voltaire in prison.
This will not postpone the Age of Reason.
Men will speak and write as they see fit,        
be governed by laws and the intellect.
        

1783

[General Washington, at Annapolis, Maryland]

"My friends, I'm honored deeply,
by the faith which you here show in me,
your confidence that these qualities
which served so well in war might now
to governance be applied successfully.    

"I, myself, have doubts:
I fear that battle's clear, cold steel will be dulled
in the gauzy murk of diplomacy.
And though I were suited to this high estate most perfectly
still I should shrink from it.
I think of Caesar,
returning, triumphant, from Gaul,
his heart full of zeal for the good of his people,                  
who achieved much, but whose lordly rule
gave way to others far less wise....

"There's a name for a man raised above men as a god:
it's 'king'. I'll have no kings!

"Thus, I surrender to you,
the duly-elected representatives of the States,
the outward and visible sign of my authority:
this sword. Let the world take note
that these united States, born under tyranny's yoke,
shall, in word and deed, henceforth
be governed democratically."


July 27, 1890

Vincent finds his world has narrowed,
(--what wonders he'd seen in la lumière d'Arles!--)
all the things for which he's sorrowed--
rejection by his cousin Kee,
reliance on his brother's charity,
failure of his "painters' community"--
come welling up....
He walks to the field from which he'd come.
In his pocket, the letter he'll never mail.
The wheatfield he'd so recently painted.
In his pocket, by his chest,...
the gun.


July 16, 1945

[Robert Oppenheimer, near Alamagordo, New Mexico]

    If the radiance of a thousand suns
    were to burst into the sky at once,
    that would mirror the Mighty One's splendor....
    I am become Death --World-destroyer.
    --The Bhagavad Gita

Everything was so much clearer
when it seemed the Germans might get the thing first....
Now it's all so terribly muddy....
Who knows what these generals'll do with it.
...The radiance of a thousand suns....                                                         ­                                                 

That 100-foot tower --completely gone!...
If we didn't do it, someone surely would....
I am become Death --destroyer of Worlds.  


January 1, 2000

Year Two-thousand, January One,
starts the new millennium.
The sales-clerk, Jacques, in Reims,
wakes to find his world unchanged.
He's got Internet access! Two cars!
He doesn't fear the universe....
The only group he's part of
is guys who drink at the local bar....
He goes to church, but doesn't believe.
His job, his marriage --nothing is certain....
Even the stars above him move.
He knows God's power --but not His love.

This is no love poem
No love, no art work, no poem
No music nor rhythm
But of images

Of farmers exultant
Though they break their backs,
Or their bones creak,
With every slash of their sickles,
The heavy strokes
Wounding light in the fiery heat of noon,
The gaunt-faced sons of earth,
Bringing home harvests of gold
To the people's granary,
Where no greedy landlords are in sight.
For centuries, the land robbers
Had squeezed their souls dry
In constant toil.
It may be that their time is up.

But this is no love poem
No love, no art work, no poem
But of history

Of workers milling around a lingering twilight.
Pounding their hammers with their might,
Ecstatic at the thought of freedom,
Yet battling still, long dreaded ills
Of feudal *******, barratry,
Imperialism
Storing up for the people’s cause,
Building a new commune in the new place
Freed from the landlord-minded President
From the imperialist ogres
Of IMF-World Bank and Uncle Sam,
The warmongers,
From oppression
And poverty and wretchedness
That, like a python, had wound
Around them to the end.

But this is no love poem
No love, no art work, no poem
No fictive tale but of radiant truth.

As throngs of men
And women march
Out of their homes
With new-found hope,
Gathering strength
As from a blasting storm,
Defiant now of lying saints or heroes
Or of murderer Presidents
Who speak with forked tongues,
As the throng march out into the streets
Flooding the cities,
Ready to offer their lives for freedom
To them would come such happiness,
Such love
No poem would express,
No art suffice to render.

This is no love poem
No piece of art, no song
Only a sense
Of how it is to tell of battles won,
Of folding in to feel the surge of triumph
Though brief perhaps,
Within this flashpoint moment
Of the people's war.

It’s my thang a langwitch spellproteckter go getter- sleek katrina stereowrite braid these monster tentacles aww now cute buzz pro bro-intellectual collaboration gush &fush; & fleek flecks firecompass full of grandiose art verses culture legions sing over and outty 5000 package cursive dialog primer kilameter romance make it equator atypical retro passion that ****** away cuss words p phucker! grade cheated tempo cuntgrunge klue move shadows to stand alones while in line to get in the barfuck gang outside party with smilie txt tshirt and a computer on diet coke kush telescope acid whatever like you feel like emitting or like have 9 thoughts about or like forgot about escaping like post fever social media to become a social sensation out of perception the limited yet coveted cherished harps and fairies and twinkly shimmery **** that doesnt growl or grunt huh? Speech please dont
As if i had the guts to stomp on a butterfly-award speaking dear diary fanatics central stranger than fictive red read (aloud allowed?)Which one. politically slurred thousand jury chapter grew some serious social security numbers and dyed them to prove a cutup battle wins the war
**** **** fick fock u
Mindseekers

for Richard, the boy who narrated life*

Today, leaves are falling.
“One day Aaron will watch the falling leaves.”
The first day of school arrives.  
“One day Champ’s mom will take him to school.”

Life is the story of life, says the narrator.

Life expands. The story lengthens.
The intertwined threads begin to pull apart.

Life is surface and sheen,
laughter, tears, opaque signs.
The story strains after fictive frames,
the hero’s epiphany, the villain’s inner pain,
and undreamt creatures beyond human sense.

And so myth and magic
give form to stories
that we no longer star in.  
New worlds take shape
where the story creates its own life,
an escape from "the shock of recognition."

In time the threads converge again.  
Life’s pattern breaks and needs a new plot.
The stories yield their human meaning—
maybe we were in them all along.

The story ends and life goes on.
Life ends and the story goes on.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
Her heart holds Him, but her hand aborts.
Searching for confirmation of a better world,
She prays to discern it, but without worship.
A believer she is, yet still fully skeptical.
She deciphers reflections from the gnostic,
The reality from the deceptive.
And hoping to fully and optimally filter the fictive
She dances with Him, going solely with the wind,
To wherever His capriciousness takes her.
She bows upon His whim.

Flash of neon signs that pulse blood of glossy lies.
Veins throb and quiver as they deliver food for hungry eyes
Red, Yellow, Turquoise, Razzmatazz feed the impulse of masses
Colors plaster empty faces filling them with alien light

Inside a flame flickers barley bright.
Dying now the last of an ancient rite
Slowly grasping for one last breath
Flickers madly, soft with regret
A cavern, now dark and hollow
Echoes what had once past followed
To be filled now with some new fictive light
Guided only by false color and artificial sight
Now they have lost their light

Bright lights shine lies to eagerly empty masses
Lips contract and speak false colors of satisfaction
Cacophony of humms and buzzes spread like molasses
Eternal night has set upon this mankind

Expectation stands in Middlecreek’s waters, it toddles
In curious little hands, in Marylanders only up for the day,
And the snow geese hang like freed shapes of the sky;

This lake comes alive with fluttering wings,
The people around me keep their eyes close to the ground
While a new and weightless thing who walks in fickle grace
Stands in awe from every eye transfixed and terrified
Even the infant child, reborn like of us
Under what little sun 100,000 geese would allow
Through flight, into a world of charcoal.

Something happened in every eye. I don’t know what gods
Revealed themselves to us, or if we walked joy from scorn
But none of us felt human or pain only the swirl of the birds
Dancing inside one another like fire, like passion,
And all the words anyone tried to say were wrong.

Could I say my name anymore and still be right?
Could I call myself so separate when every heart there
Stuck to a single note, and every mouth struck dumb?
Could I speak beauty any longer, or had the geese
Renewed the tongue a fictive beast?
We never were what we thought we were
All but angels afraid of floating there.

My thoughts sometimes travel back
To that cool, midsummer’s night
Under that diamond canopy
Two souls as one took flight

I have a map of you inside
This fictive mind of mine
And remember most of all, your peak,
The one mountain I chose to climb

You beat around the bush a bit
Before discovering my secret place
A garden, flowering under rain,
Whose fruit you had a taste

The sky explodes as fireworks
The earth begins to shake
And a volcano somewhere inside of us
Roars loudly, wide awake

But the tragedy about a climb
Is that you have to go back down
But all the way we’ll smile
And laugh about what we have found

So as the years go bye
And I survey that diamond canopy
I hope that you look up too,
And are reminded of me

I love to sleep
I sink so deep
Into worlds of dreams
And everything seems
So good and exact
It makes me react
To reality's life
The pain and the strife
Life is a nightmare
And good things are rare
If compared to your mind
Where gladness you find
I hope that you all
To sleep tonight will fall
You will appreciate
The good and the great
The world in your head
When you lie down in bed
It makes your forget
About rough things you've met
Your body will go
To imagination's show
No limit, no rule
Everything turns cool
Imagination is a place
Where pain leaves no trace
Your worries will fade
Everything will be made
The way that you choose
Sadness will loose
There's no point in trying
Avoiding pain and denying
In real life, outside your head
All happiness will be as dead
It know this way to look at things
Gets cynical when this world brings
You fictive gladness in life for real
And happiness is all you feel
I know it sometimes happens here
That feelings goes your way, my dear
And washes away all of your pain
And puts it on the forgotten train

Existential ache,
Visceral and immediate
Occludes all reason,
A fated Solitude.
The myth of dearth,
In prose retold
Retaining fictive resolve,
Tacitly confessed.
Ineluctable Torpor
Petitions my
Ardent supplications.
Present,
Beckoned in the dulcet
Confluence —
Beauty and affliction
Freshets of silence,
Redressing the fallow
Surface of my soul.

© 2016 W. S. Warner