Tag: surrealism

Mystic Arcadias

Ex-Sonnet: Something Beneath the Library

The past few nights I’ve dreamt a stair abyss.
Every narrow city was electric.
Technicolor compasses melting under carpets.
It seemed I was a speck of ink on music
Despite the darkened picture frame and wine,
Each animal collapsed black holes in rooms below
And almost hell’s where I’d wake up at day.
Some secret vacations existed in a dictionary
Some soiled taupe school cardigan
Some hiding cosmic threat to waking peace
In catacombs where no child thought to look.
Along the hall which less and less grew worms
My sweat confessed the staircase was a maze
Where every sky became a clean white glaze
The last I slid on a black and cracking bridge.

 

 

Mystic Arcadias
Day 2: my veins are now vines. 

There’s been another security breech in which my capillaries have
shed like snakes and are now webbed rhizomes. It had, all along,
been a conspiracy of spores. My wrists suddenly shone green while 
I wrote, photosynthesizing at 3pm. A hand jerked to my head to 
check if there were leaves and there weren’t; I breathed and let 
my vascular neurons pollinate, microscopic blossoms bursting with 
every fired synapse behind my eyes. The vines filling up my casing 
stopped. But, at that point, I found I wanted them to burst from 
under my fingernails and take up the pen for me; they never did. 
Nor did the bees stick-and-poke words on the wall or my skin 
yesterday to help me decipher any code.
Small Birds

Not a baby bird

I’d been walking cross the mesa snow swathed in down and speckled wear, alone
And bathed by moonshine there in bare pastel
when I palmed the onion in my pocket. Basking in the shadowed cleft.
I tucked my head to my breast
like a mother-robin and smoothed the layered ruffs
On my scarved chest and on the onion skin,
waited for it to warm my palm,
beckoning a phantom pulse
Expecting it to beat.

But its globule one-pound started, pulseless,
Only rustled and shed flakes when my hand opened round the bud
To join in on the snowfall
The waveless and white
The waterless lake
To punctiliously fill a single foot print which I made
Despite which I’d still etched each step,
pressing the soft birch in parallel, hot-iron soles, taciturn brands
steaming depressions as neat as first stitches in a seamless quilt.
A thread-straight line abandoning trees for freelancing the aimless,
frameless terrain
With my
wrapped and
Nameless self, willing
The lifted onion to evaporate up-swirl behind my pace.