the rose reading room

There are as many muses here
trapped between frail pages
as there are souls alive,
flickering, in the city.
They whisper from the sarcophagi
into which they were laid,
dressed in flower petals and kissed
to an in-between life,
by careful curators
who stand by as they fade to catch
the last breath of their birth.

The entombment commences
in the way that humans dream
of burying their brothers —
not for death, but for a soliloquy sleep.
One that allows the rightful king to
slumber through sorrow with a heartbeat
and awake to something known
rather than an entirely undiscovered country.

The murmuring voices wait, wake soon
when the proper soul slices itself
from the artificial lights
and the blocks of strife
and to this bound.
Soul revives long-locked soul
from the curse of darkness brought
by the burden of light.
They will hear the muses whisper
over the roar of the never-
ending
city, and set her,
even if only in half light,
in half life,
through ones childlike ability to spin the globe,
free

Sun in a Supermarket Ring

When I saw the Sun as God
and death as a man with
a scythe and a pen,

I needed the city.
Holding books to my chest,
I carried them through Greenwich
and nestled them
in the bricks of Wall Street.

I had been awake since before the birds.

The billboards made pitch darkness seem
like the day, so bright it was
as if the sun inched closer to the earth.
I underestimated
the neverending spectacle.
In the way it convinces writers they can
become poets, convinces readers
They can write,

It Convinced Me that
at the highest point in the city,
therefore the highest point in the world,
I too could reach
the manmade heavens sprawled before me
in scars of white We have carved into the earth,
and I could fill the blackness between star-bright lights,
if only
i reached back.

When the planets melted in my fingertips,
I let them drip onto summer asphalt.
I
drowned for eight days.
I
washed up in the Hudson Bay.
The salt scrubbed my skin red, stung
my lips sticky and yellow.
I was a sunflower.

Prowling the streets, I determined to
create
a new set of scars on the earth, but
I saw names where there were none, and
I asked myself if I preferred
HomeMade Moonshine or The Church?
without questioning why
there could not be an
in between.

For one who is at home
in an airport, I failed to wonder,
almost failed to see
if
there is an in between.

I face the island once again.
It pulls. Not as it used to.
To see the civilization not as
the key,
not as a breath of life
is all I can ask of myself.

Somehow, I filled the space between stars
from two and a half thousand miles away.
With sledding and open windows,
supermarket rings and white petals,
satire and The Mysterious Forces of the Universe,
there was a clearing in my eyes
-- was there not?
and I saw that the sun,
not the city lights,
as eternal.

All That Remains

I have found in you one with whom 

I can be tired

as the oil paint globe we spun at dawn

creaks past the golden age,

Into the sunset,

and begins 

to settle.

I have found in you one with whom 

I can be afraid

as the rises and falls of our bodies, like waves, 

ever so often are 

unison, in breath, 

In the final breaths,

of ourselves;

of Neptune; 

of Apollo;

of Atlas

At the hands of Prometheus. 

You are teaching me to sleep. I've never known

how closing eyes and minds to the sorrows of

The race we created 

can settle, ourselves, into the always fresh

Ink of the heavens.

How it can settle our creations, who

No Longer ponder the existence of Gods as 

they fade 

Like the morning fog that from their sight

veils us.

The novels I wrote will rot,

unfinished, to be finished

by the earth. In one gulp.

The music you made ceases on a tenor note, 

made to mimic a tenor voice,

never quite able to capture the tremor of the muse.

Pages written, pages unwritten;

it ends on a dissonant chord

I have found in you someone who will 

Remain.

When our patch of The Universe has been 

cultivated to dust, you

will meet me over our grave. You 

will say:

— With each empire we rise, we must fade another.

We may not have saved them from 

Not saving themselves, but 

I have sent those who fight only on

Behalf of the art,

and you gifted France Napoleon, 

gifted Napoleon France. 

I reply:

— C'est la vie or Carpe Diem?

Both are to thank;

Both are to blame.

You will take my hand. 

The earth we created will open up,

and like the heavens,

will swallow us whole.