40. crimson shade

a voyage round the dead space of my fading projection










in detail one thrives, in stale encapsulation, in spiritual shortcuts

in health oaths, in void journeys, in risible scripture: “toil, slaughter, evil whispers...”

in the veil of disdain for strength, for growth, and for other paltry oozes.



I stood outmaneuvered constrained deferential, my ink blood

in woe, with erratic breathing, I told myself: how can you ignore

the gullies, their suddenly beaming eyes, and instead chew alive

the cloying width of undulant nonentities albeit properly geographical?

no, no; what matters dwells in caves, caverns: weight, momentum, booming room

lurk therein, and decay and blooming risk, and excess and the ghostly beasts.



I had taught myself thoughts, inchoate mysticisms, initiations to

polluted astonishing scholarly analysis steeped in liturgies and spirals

rather belonging to the ticklish realms of the philologist and the hypnotist.



emboldened in my linen clothes I followed into more inflammatory thicker

pearly spawns, indeed into almost bold carnal intuitions

I argued that fakes alleviate the better omitted polemical stutters of distress

that coincidence roughly only insofar as it is redemptive rises above nonsense

that reluctant nitwits, their remote flashes of genuine epistemology

are ontological masterpieces of busy sophistication.



those reams of parody transiently dissolved for me the d of “death”

and the remaining “eath” became a lisping existential echo

a defiant hullabaloo against the elite corps of the spinoff

and the emaciated demons of the tilted yellow overgrown noontime speed.



sleeplessness and coffee plus gawking at the wayfarers to and from

the cemetery shared feathers with the thin edges of my silence.



the mood was often repellent, I was afraid of assurances

of cocky females, worse I disliked the deteriorating departure of my toughness

my rapacity, through the tangents of caricatural remorse.



prolific adventurers of whom I’d heard the prowesses stunned

fascinated the underpants out of me and the erudite documents

the gems of keen soliloquies that bore on the unexplored, the utterly pathological

did nurture the encomiums on my startled no longer flaccid lips.



I took as vapid nuisances the bathetic fondles of stinking castrated phallocrats

whose rusted skirts dropped as a flight of dusty moths

over the damp squib of my sourly scoured codicil.



the wayward weather and the untoward locus of my renowned shivers

waned and evaporated as the tribes that erstwhile sailed the skies

steeped in zest and leftward leanings in the deformed excoriated evening.



but those tasteless metaphors belaboring as the hordes of senescence

at the arid demesne of posterity at length proved worthless, gave no relief.



I wove, as I still (threadbare) weave, an adolescent dependence to heights:

the geographical warts that cowardly though solemnly roughly endure

don’t ever shrink as would a bum cloak submitted to the same abuse of wanton bombast.



in conclusion I’ll say that I ascended full of rigor and gratitude to the estranged

summits where disagreeable witches mourn even now the destroyed pledges

that should have clinched the aberrant conflict of their latent ambiguity.



relying like them on weirdness I selfishly, full of vanity, renounced

in extended snores the earlier flirts with unruliness and disintegration

and damned if wickedly I didn’t cling now to the extravagant tactic

of seeing to notch a few sad surreptitious constructive actions of my own.



in ludicrous streams ran throughout the expectorations that I called

poetry, in revenge against which my ventriloquizing navel lavishly frothed:

infested deluge of graphic noxious gasps where monkey guffaws

and plenty other demerits (later blamed on spies and other greasy foreigners)

grew, with a gently relative ease, at last tectonic

so that I felt even buried before any catastrophic incident had really taken place.



and yet in contentment is, in fine, my conceit that I was (as I am) chosen:

an ambivalent closet introverted inner laureate

whose acute glad obscure schematic keeping-at-it venomous spitting

vexes in its error-prone nebulousness the eye of no denizen

my commitment to realize untold infidelities never given

oh well up until now, a proper, verily plausible, chance.