The Horse
You think of Nietzsche kneeling down, undone
before the broken horse of his inflamed
mind, think you know his grief, the shallow drone
of his ausgespielt heart, how he became
the bleeding horse's sides, became the sun
of its resigned regard. You kneel the same
transfigured way, as if you are the one
who's seen the gilded germ of genesis
in every bulb and swollen bloom become
the wailing genius of your penitence.
You fall on bended knee inside a raw
ferment of death and dirt and failed pretense,
in empty lots and fields of weedy straw,
where seeds gone punk inside their fallen pods
hum carious with insects that draw
in random runes their softly rotting gods.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
If I Die Before I Wake
If you do not die young you do not live,
at least not well—you know too much to give
the smallest damn, and when a door appears
upon a perfect bending arc that soars
above the breathless grace of gravity
you topple through and all the brevity
of your falling falls with you, ash and stem
and wailing light that crawls the honeyed limbs
of lying trees in which a question swings
like bats or children waiting in the wings
to ride the febrile currents of their blood
into each tender morning shaped in mud
and sprinkled with fine sugar sand as white
as any ghost surrendered in the night.
__________________________________________________________________________
The Ghosts of Birds
They never quite alight on these bare nests
of rat-chewed shells and bones they haunt. They come
and go from crowded lines in vagrant wisps
of cat and nerve and endless horsefly hum
above the patient evening streets gone black
with flesh crushed thin as every last regret.
Their hollow bones leak zippered trails of smoke
across a brutal neon sky, and yet
they linger, Holy Ghost and salted tails,
in children's nameless dreams of God's intent
to make his bread and angels of their pale
and smallish souls spun through his firmament
and back again like ghosts of birds that fly
as feathered light inside their sleeping eyes.
You think of Nietzsche kneeling down, undone
before the broken horse of his inflamed
mind, think you know his grief, the shallow drone
of his ausgespielt heart, how he became
the bleeding horse's sides, became the sun
of its resigned regard. You kneel the same
transfigured way, as if you are the one
who's seen the gilded germ of genesis
in every bulb and swollen bloom become
the wailing genius of your penitence.
You fall on bended knee inside a raw
ferment of death and dirt and failed pretense,
in empty lots and fields of weedy straw,
where seeds gone punk inside their fallen pods
hum carious with insects that draw
in random runes their softly rotting gods.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
If I Die Before I Wake
If you do not die young you do not live,
at least not well—you know too much to give
the smallest damn, and when a door appears
upon a perfect bending arc that soars
above the breathless grace of gravity
you topple through and all the brevity
of your falling falls with you, ash and stem
and wailing light that crawls the honeyed limbs
of lying trees in which a question swings
like bats or children waiting in the wings
to ride the febrile currents of their blood
into each tender morning shaped in mud
and sprinkled with fine sugar sand as white
as any ghost surrendered in the night.
__________________________________________________________________________
The Ghosts of Birds
They never quite alight on these bare nests
of rat-chewed shells and bones they haunt. They come
and go from crowded lines in vagrant wisps
of cat and nerve and endless horsefly hum
above the patient evening streets gone black
with flesh crushed thin as every last regret.
Their hollow bones leak zippered trails of smoke
across a brutal neon sky, and yet
they linger, Holy Ghost and salted tails,
in children's nameless dreams of God's intent
to make his bread and angels of their pale
and smallish souls spun through his firmament
and back again like ghosts of birds that fly
as feathered light inside their sleeping eyes.