More in Dreaming [sonnet]

O, craftfully carved soapstone and
alabaster visage, what that you knew
of all of the gentle dreams I'd plan'td;
a green garden in which our love might grow.

O, that only I could demonstrate to
you how wondrous together we could be,
spirits entwined and bound as thread on screw,
if only I could charm you to love me.

Such things are correctly known to be dreams -
for circumstances - and great many fears -
Forever, I'm trapped in gardens' green,
stuck to merely casting you longing leers.

Yet ultimately, I'm sure that I would
love you more dreaming than in waking would.

The Bog-Witch [sonnet]

Quarter-tooth angled archingly reverse,
her snaggles enrapture me; hither,
come, my fairest, grant me those perverse
acts – lest I, like you, become withere’d!

This, I cannot, allow to come to pass!
Whether by charms, wit, big brains or huge cocks,
Whatever cost you pay, I’ll have that ass!
For my be-warted, I’ll indulge no stops.

You can cry, resist and plead, extolling
Unto me the injustice of m’love,
But it shall avail you all of nothing,
As my sights are on that filthy trove.

Flee, run, wail and never cease in weeping
In a steel cage our love I’m keeping.

Christmas Lights

Water white like ghosts falls
into glass. Upended,
sickly-thick liquid encircles –
a new, easy-access-brand elixir
for an old kind of contamination.
Burning more than should,
corroding boils and poxes
as it slides, falls, digs deep –
scoring chasms and lines
while falling – unanticipated –
a novel redress for an ancient affliction.
Internal temperature rising as fast as
awareness falling, composure sedate
but sentient, growing distantly fearful -
even though the snake oil accompanied
guarantee: “Whatever ails you.”
Wonder, I, if said whatever is said oil,
mentally transfixing that fast-falling cure
into a clever-cruel kind of contagion –
thoughts worsen as poison of aporia slips deep,
and hands-to-throat, digits dig deep –
archaic antidote; a brutal purge, and
mangled boils and liquefied pox
Explode
in a burning sea rising, aflame and
charring as experience-dictates-should,
while sickly-thick water-white ghosts escape,
screaming in exile –
face-to-floor, thoughts rod-grounded,
awareness – gone, snake oil - purged,
malady - sustained.

Swordsong

Swordsong: Freeform

Peering up from the precipice, a cyclops! – a
Many-fanged and mono-eyed beast,
Flesh a sickly sea-shell and putrid yellow as a
Series of pustules pulse rivulets of green-black blood,
Staining scarred surfaces and shadowing engorged strength.

Reaffirmed grip on haft,
I plunge the sticked-spike a shade-shy of horizontal,
Missing the mark obvious but finding purchase,
Shattering clavicle and spraying sinew in a perverse sort
Of macabre rainbow arc, yet met with instant,
Abject terror: spear now not merely stuck but gripped
By mine beholden nemesis, and he shifts, twists the
Leverage and I, trained in the art of never-surrender-never,
Have not his primitive power to resist and thus fall,
Giving way to laws of momentum – and the world shudders.

Eyes-wide as fist-eclipses-sun, a quick scramble,
Desperate-probing-reflexive grab for the half-arm length stabber,
Unsheathe, roll, aim and thrust:
A scoring glance, slicing more pox and pus than
Bone or gristle, but desired effect achieved:
Nemesis rails, howling, orb clenched and pointing skyward,
Arms guarding reflexive at bloodied torso, leaving precious,
Glorious goal unguarded:
A backwards roll, leaning into the earth like Atlas,
I push, spring, and the world gleams in high-contrast
Blood-red and silvered-steel-sword as I’m propelled skyward –
Blade-and-hand acting in concert, a conductor in a symphony
Of prospective gore seeking to punish the cyclopean’s dissonance,
I plunge deep, scoring a bassonic rumble from
His jugular and cacophonic crackings as his cerebral
Column gives way to the superior song.

His shuttered eye now open as he slumps, falling to the
Ground ilke a dead god, it develops a strange sort of calm,
As if he’s hearing his own song of slaying – but that
Sizzling, that pig-eating-slop sound, that wasn’t my song –
That must be his, and awareness dawns as adrenal sets –
Blinded by blood and battle, I’d neglected to heed
The refuse of the beast’s bilious eruptions,
Blown back from the force of my blade, and now, immersed
By the nauseating, liquid-green mass, I am devoured from
Without.

I lay now, eyes alternating skies, and weep that I
Am sapped entirely of strength enough for noble suicide:
I shall die here, propped astern like a failed Atlas, a
Boneless, gibbering mash of grit, guts, and warm, soupy glory,
muted and deafened to the howlsong from above of vultures.

The Maiden as Demiurge

Lewis-Carrol Carrol. Or something. Word limits and form rules are for chumps.

Maiden, maiden, maiden, a depilidate mobious minaret –
Holical, Eris begs an atlatl defection, the
Genuis-from-Mars technique – an erathicus lecanopteris.
Suffretex, past-perfection in pastel gloxinia,
Glowingly acidic and shiftingly glossidic, it’s cosmaltry mariala;
Ungual outmoded, holonym singing Aquilar rapax as demiurge.
Demos and Phobos weep, coruscating terrathos, killing riva.

Swell quickly, optic ophidia, lest the ira florena rise –
Rise, maiden, rise optic ophidia, ignore Irredelphine!
Strut the hematacolpa and pace-willow, but fail flow:
Deciduous telechir beckons, demanding autobogotic-hajra.
Piss-venom and picea hovea, eche verri naught echo –
Beta-decay and COBOL error, fandango with teeth
And sing praise for Eucladanic soignè solaris

Sprint quick, maiden-solidago gesparisè, to Misra pourum!
Majerns and hapax, death-knell aloud and encelia,
Enfloranè, haste! Enatic haste tichodrome, flee, anise!
Apios, harken: tryst-sans-thermobic sweeping of thresher-thrown,
Little-low else yet achroma, de-jubilance:
Fall fairly, ayah! So to be so, blanking systemic,
A thousand steps for one death.

Bad Habits

Form: list poem.

Stoned again,
Post-hasted doubting and raving,
Confused why I torture myself so –
Truer words never spoken as lies,
The dull, pumpkin-glow of the broken lamp casting ghosts,
Filling my visions with demons I’d thought excised.
Stoned again,
Alone in its tendrils again,
I travel –
Travel through ideas shattered and plexiglass melting,
Singing and burning as it covers my senses like a myelin sheath,
Conducting protons-only,
But my brain is slow and the receptors dull,
And the raw input manifests only as trails of spirits.
Stoned again,
The madness thick as bog sludge,
Stinking of scorched sulfur,
It kicks corroded and dead gears into spin,
Generating false ideas and wild delusions
That I know aren’t real but –
Nothing else here is, either, especially not you,
Disembodied you, listener.
Stoned again,
But not alone this time no,
Her idea ghosting simulacra,
Taunting me with her shortcomings and spitting like venom
Those thousands of details I’d always hated while
Refusing acknowledgment, but
Like a brick golem she’s got a core,
A conduit of last-year’s hopes, and I flee, panicked –
Stoned again,
The clouds high above the ruined October grass,
Laughing like spaceships, and returning me to boyhood fancy:
I’ll never be an astronaut.

In Hoc Signe Vinces [In This Sign They Shall Conquer]

Title was commonly used in reference to Roman conquests. Wiki it, asshole. Form is Sestina.

From the corroded portal of his mouth erupted sunlight,
Spilling forth and poisoning the land; the mad god
Had spoken, and from his words issued only collapse,
Driving into frenzy his legions, and among those followers
He counted scores of angels and seraphim,
And not a figure illuminated in creation avoided the light as it had fallen.

Poised on a shrouded throne, the mad god set his chosen
Legions forward, those grim harbingers of dawn and sunlight.
At their head he appointed Lucifer, Champion of the Seraphim,
To press forward ahead of the voice of the mad god,
To secure for he and his entire coterie of followers
A new kingdom, ripe and wonting for conquest and collapse.

Thousands were smashed under the iron-shod boot of illumination, and the collapse
Of worlds and nations imminent: the forebears of man had fallen.
Reaping the glories of the coming dawn, Lucifer and his followers
Became drunk on the power and succumbed further to the grasp of sunlight,
And lifted high their praise of the almighty Yahweh, the mad god –
Thus it was that the taste of dominion developed in the seraphim.

At the very height of their favor to the mad god, that Champion of Seraphim,
Lucifer, had come to know those broken sons of man post-collapse,
And had come also to understand their mutual worship of the mad god;
That is to say, he had come to know that both he and they were fallen,
But he knew not where from – were they not the progeny of sunlight,
The very pinnacle of creation, he and all of his followers?

Some immortal truth was exposed to he as lie; that those followers,
Supplicants to the mad god, counting among them man, angel and seraphim,
Had been cheated by that enthroned and shrouded speaker of sunshine,
Cruelly coerced into exacting upon man an all-encompassing collapse,
And he, called now by Gabriel as Satan, dwelt on how far man had fallen:
Man must have a new dawn, he decided, and man himself should be god.

By even mere thought of this, Lucifer had maligned himself with god
And the challenge lay now in bringing the light of truth to his followers;
Over time, a full third of all the mad god’s kingdom had fallen
From his poisoned grace, but many enemies had he made among the seraphim.
They lusted now for little else than bringing the rebel sect the full circle of collapse,
And though the cost would be great, always high was the cost of true sunlight.

But justice is seldom conducted in sunlight, and anathema to the mad god –
For in delivering man’s collapse, he had forever damned his followers,
And Lucifer alone among the seraphim understood how far they all had fallen.