Embrace the objections of rain and feel the walls sweat as they sleep, the boiler room is burgeoning.
It’s April 2023, the cruelest month where the ward is bald and bleached as the residents thrash and scream and in the lulls the flowers bleed with clung jaws and torn veins dripping.
They put wild minds in storage and rest knowing those convalescing will not be seen.
© CMR, 2023
The trees practice asceticism and fast
not knowing the emaciation that awaits them
at year’s end.
The sun becomes a fascist
and cuts the earth’s rations,
the light dwindles away.
The very air has grown less tense
and I can breathe easy again
aware that all is fleeting,
and I live as if my senses are deteriorating.
The days feel like a jaunt in the afternoon,
and every candle lit is a singular miracle.
My domestic skeleton
and nostrils are in season,
my eyes languorous
and all is more precious.
The season is dryer but lovelier,
infantile bum-shuffling
to the moribund geriatric
wraps round my mind
as I commence to rake.
© CMR, 2022
The last man on earth
is actually the first
I
A transient panhandler scuttles along a sidewalk
towards the affluent dog-walkers
in the vein of paparazzi
A slatternly junkie has a very sharp stride
and averts her gaze until passing out of frame
then is never seen again in direct sunlight
At a lucrative luncheon
incessant perky whispers
deafen the local curmudgeons
Numerous apertures, numerous fixtures:
vape clouds, septum rings, blackout tattoos,
kratom, gluten-allergies, nothing new.
II
Ashwagandha is in
and testosterone is up:
There’s nightly coital marathons
and genderfluid cosplay parades
and vaginal film festivals of flesh
and phallic maelstroms of men at work
and helicoptering cocks outside the Yoga studio
and DNA sloppily sprayed from Burke to Cherry Street
and congealed linens from chronically single millennials
and virtue signaling up the ass.
III
The bones and sinews
of the Tobacco and Textile Industries
are omnipresent
Most of the old mills
have been converted to apostasy:
Into gregarious craft breweries
that only serve hoppy beer.
Into high-ceiling exposed-brick lofts for lease,
not apartments, not condos, but suites,
and one wonders how many people
lost limbs or minds, or even died here.
The nightlife rages on
with ax-throwing hipsters
hoarding the market share,
the local thoroughfare
while spilt privilege slathers the concrete.
Arena lighting and lulls of sound emanate from the ballpark
until the epilogue of unoccasioned fireworks commences
The mad scene coalition strains to slough
dark paraphernalia from the grounds of the Gentry,
the ossified layers of illicit litter underneath
are somewhat reminiscent of a pawnshop parking lot.
The City insists on celebrating itself
Coming soon:
Arcadia in a minefield.
I left too long a while
and lost the uplifting flow
to more celestial realms
unheralded northwest of leaden bells
alabaster feathers fall as ashes from on high
and angels sojourn no more in this stormy land
voices clash echoing from nether reaches
then cry never to dream again
writes the dead man’s hand.
I am my dead father
I am my unborn son
I am the one burning
quietly in the evenings
sharing the same story
of humble ghosts
walking on
in solemn silence
my hand in my hand
each to his world
our sunken worlds
weathered by shadows
holding us in my arms
without tenderness
but tireless and firm
and sleep now
as under the moon
we are together bound
All matter, constellations are laid waste,
primal wreckage strewn hither-thither
where within floating in space
a single speck of stardust
or a far-flung flake of galactic ash
is larger than the wondrous residue
referred to as earth.
Whence we formed from words
exceeding enigma, sifted and strained
through language, this miscreant cosmos
has been preserved for a psychotic ending
by the grotesque hands of a taxidermist so deranged
that his masterwork was a Gothic Cathedral —
so terrorized by extravagance and superstition that people
thought it was in fact a shared and single body
of the holy trinity embalmed
with faithful members of the mass.
The carcass stars burning
through lightyears expendable
are our ignis fatuus —
out there
in the deep, silent hours
where the densest plenum of dark
is embroidered taut in the air:
all horizons nowhere to be found.
Ubi sunt 