Mistaken Faces
Mistaken faces. A darkling skull with eyes selenian.
To replace the roof and chassis, shingles holes in the galvanic
sward, the brick clocktower’s been debelled. As ventral foehns
from moon and sun comb telluric the tower’s faces ventifact
mimetic, fired skies a cloudless white all day all night
the light what light hotpink and racy. Prima facie
facsimiles. More or less everything these days. Something
in me is done with me. A voice is wanting, the deep truth
is imageless.(1) Harder to intuit than the abyss
is byss. The alkahest. By now the graveyard’s holt of stour
cottonwoods has meadowed that the deer heads float above wildflowers
lentic, then lotic in between inosculated boles,
each one a stand beneath a strand of chalky sky one tastes
whose rarefied cumulus is its own negative
ventrally shadowed and punctuated by balloon and kite.
Too easy to forget that everything will flower and that the sun
is called the sun because the real word for it is too terrible.(2)
Nonetheless. Would words world I would. I’d cotton to it and it
to I. Lapis lazuli fleur-de-lis. Always abstract the sun.
Long ago and faraway the future has begun.
Starspancelled fitful nights, sublunar days unfit intercalated
throwaways, solstitial chad the sun or moon between the Jiffy
silos and clocktower both procryptic with the weather
and its favored demiurge seen slant—my beautiful spires
irrespired losung interstices each suspired merestones.
I can’t clock the luxury of fiction. I can’t clock seeing sight.
Sunyata. I was never there. Absent, always. It all happened
without me.(3) I’ll always have been. Repetend. The chromoed
sky awaiting tornadoes and in their wake. It is as if
I were. It is as if I were stillborn alive. It is
as if I were as such wherefrom such its exist within
wereform until chorine exhaust exhausts one’s wereform glirine
for the worst and worsted for the wear without a reason
for a word on it. Saudade. Caroming tussive skies.
A long goodbye to beauty.(4) So long so long.
Now as then yet then as now a rift empyreal
in December’s gastine skies sehnsuchts the exquerent’s
ipsedixit days. Vastation. Eloigned to fastness. The past
rewrote to hold beheld gratuity beholden
to pyrolatry apricity verticity. The long lost
futured sense of current possibility once rote returned.
Sideral stars sidereal again. It is as if.
There was a time when the sky spoke so loud I couldn’t write it
down without a chisel. Import impress impost. Alley to alley one’s
aleatorism may open and dispersed inverse.
It is as if surceased surprise may soon arrive to rive
one’s ipsedixit life with joy, the kind that makes of death
an enemy once and for all.
FOOTNOTES:
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Joy Williams
Samuel Beckett
Mark Lanegan