Preludes, Book I

Prelude #1

Boundless folds of marigolds
No one shall ever see.
The Porcelain to put them in
That haunts my memory.

Prelude #2

As trees their valued umbrage shed
To placate wind of summer’s stead,
So too I offer leaves of verse
To sway your snub to govern terse.
Thus if you end your heather term
Then my verdure will grow back firm,
And if your love’s shine e’er sustain
my writ of you will greenest gain.

Prelude #3

Your laughter more clearly exists to me than my own thoughts,
So you become the truest reality to dwell in me.
And since your shard stuck in me must drag to like,
I can’t resist being drawn to you by selfhood’s gravity.

But don’t let your bits leap out from me to sculpture re-complete,
For then I’d waif-wander lowly shores with ever-hollow cavity.
Let us abide bound to perch Love’s peak: for by being
Incomplete, you’d save me from incompleteness's lone depravity.

Prelude #4

I’ve lived many lifetimes since I can’t recall
Half of what I’ve done from birth to anon,
For every new mem’ry I gain from now on
Usurps a timeworn one from years bypast,

So life’s felt length now shall never be surpassed,
and to want more life is a quenchless end,
Hence though I have more youth that I shall expend
I won’t fear death’s final, imminent pall

I’ve loved many lifetimes, since I could recall,
whose deep luster I’ll never know in all.

Prelude #5

A spider’s legs deftly carriage its poisonous torso,
I too am wicked inward though handsomely my hands flow,
Which spin-out fugue and rhyme, shaped webs of gorgeous gossamer,
To capture men and make them praise my remorseless ego.

Before from pulpit’s sermon could I only see my sin,
But now empirically can I see the wrong within
For my void-filled eight-eyes can’t miss how I use spinnerets
To fashion silky psaltery paged with self-eminence

Good Lord oblate with mercury my muscled lips and legs,
Though I’m too scared of my own sin to for forgiveness beg,
And then your silvery mercy will burn off my gross hairs
And force the virtue out of me in mechanistic prayers,

And then please take my woven works and redesign their shape,
“Dei Gloriam” retitle them and weave them no escape,
For then I’ll be your will-less toy placed in their sticky mesh,
A silver spider, glazed by God, with goodness as his flesh.

Prelude #6

The perfect poem has not occurred,
Since poems perfect by slight degrees,
So don’t regret a crooked word,
Perfection then will steal your ease,

But if our writ is Zeno’s race,
And we shall never heaven grasp,
Then why stride with impressive pace,
If all it gains is breathe with rasp?

Prelude #7

Cascades brush to nothingness--
Casual streams cobalt your hips--
Profoundly distanced, the stars roar static
Out to Godless audience--

Harvest leaves drift on the trickling flow,
Below the emerald eaves. The water laps
wet your back as your charcoal hair you lave.

By the armoires, by the armchairs, I left lilacs you won’t go see,
I caught the freshest lavender that you won't accept from me,
And still you bathe and sing soft verse out there to all the elm
Offering to each passing leaf your milk and honey warm.

Through night, bothered by clothing and cloth, I feign the pose of sleep,
And by my chronic thoughts of you the somber time I keep
Since thoughts of you are my sole hope to calm this raged unrest
But spurn recall of eschewal that keeps woke grief abreast,
And still you wash, shoulder to wrist, with thick whips of frothed tide
Sleeving in white to christen yourself your own vainglory’s bride.

Some hours, by hap, I’ll swindle sleep and dream our mid-stream embrace,
But soon, I’m woke from this cruel nap by the pitiless grin of space,
Woke to recall that I never shall hold your water-polished body,
Left to waste my life estimating how I'll waste paltry eternity,
And still you wade and sprinkle drops into your wet cupped hand
to canonize my tears with others' on your ego's trophy stand.

Prelude #8

Its when the day inclines towards night
that through its sunset it's most bright,
I know likewise Your sweetest Grace
when after sin I choose to chase.

Once I'm grieved by night's a-whoring
a mother's love blue day does bring,
but by noon I'm bored of goodness
and flee in night to You transgress.

But this circled folly You love,
for Your Mercy waxes thereof,
since blue prismed is rainbow-returned
To show love's best hue, grace unearned.

So when I lapse into the night,
recall to cast towards moon your light,
So I'm preserved by its beam's pull,
that in Your Grace I e'er cycle.

Prelude #9

Your head lies down, a polished pearl,
Your hair like nacre mollusks whorl,
Your glow twists from this round helix
And does my mulm-hushed soul elix.
You’re present sea that mariner sails
But past sea too of half-land whales,
And last, you skirr through future tides
And strain shore’s ken by brine-edge strides.

Prelude #10

I’d travel as many days as a dulcimer plucks
For my neck to be stained by your syrupy kiss,
But its time’s distance that sets your heart to flux,
Not a difference of space that's amiss,

Age hinders me from embracing your sienna mien,
Like those oaks that incline to smell your auburn hair—
Its only when they’ve finished their yearlong lean,
That your ambrosial scent shall lessen there—

Like them I can waft faintly but can't hold,
But if we love what matters that I’m this old?
We love by spirit and mark not skin’s yearly rings.
During my youth I’d see God clambering through all things:

In those august times I wish you knew me
And let your sweet lips to mine hang idly
Since God would blind us of our fluky fleshed cages
And show us Colors of Autumn, Colors of Ages.

Prelude #11

Better my head three-portioned Guide, for I
need be exorcised of demons--and angels too.
In me, a believer prays and an apostate weeps,
but this two-personed nonsense also undo.

The bizarre voice of god
Ravished me with commanding presence,
Overthrew me with hellfire judgments,
and made captive You to diverse forms of insanity.

Reason, Your viceroy in me,
protected me from this destructive voice,
blotted out my fears of unpardonable sin,
and restored me back to my childhood's healthy normalcy

You gave me my life back,
So what you hindered completely remove:
Holy Guide of Doubt, Science, Logic,
the sin of faith--question, falsify, disprove.

Prelude #12

The seeds of love are whisked to air
To random fall on fertile grounds,
Its whimsy’s wind that guides tree’s heir
To dive to sundry bachelor’s bounds.
If choice to love is zephyr’s cull,
then why by its caprice be swayed?
But you’ll abide and blindly lull
and leave me veiled by fallow blade.

Prelude #13

We heard that things
would slow and freeze
and stay that way forevermore

I choose to stand by a dock shore
as things clicked to their final lock
and watch the humid black noon air

Prelude #14

As an old tongue translates to new
your lips' allure decrypts to me,
but my love back-transcribes askew,
my argot's grace you do not see.
And since sense passes one way through,
my speech is clipped when sent to you

unlike the way your words will spill:
snowflakes quill-etched,
English or Spanish,
earth-known but sky-niched--
descending from caps of wisest truth,
dissolved by my grope still grimed with youth—

Prelude #15

Prayer scares me shitless—for after “Amen” I sometimes
Feel dizzying depression, signs of meaninglessness
In blank succession, accelerated awareness
That just amplifies duress,
Baseless woes made
Trembling throes--

I’ve wondered before
If I'm fucked-up somehow
But Merciful Lord, don't let these fits
be defects, but saintly projects: birth pains,
making way, by clever theodicy, for butterflies to emerge from waves. Amen.

Prelude #16

I’ve reached the peak, but then must fall,
For Life gives Moses quick a view,
I breathe the heights, then leave it all,
While life tastes eons, death plans coup.

And if life is just felt as fixed,
Then all things made shall wilt one day,
So let’s sing verse with script unmixed:
To be poets, from poems let’s stray

Prelude #17

You have two souls, so your presence is doubly known—
You feel twice the hue and timbre we feel, twofold the peace and woe,
So teach us twice as long as we’ve let sons of God
That your wisdom might out-endure their loved tittle and yod.

And since you are blessed with soul’s surplus, will you not loan me one?
Love me while you sojourn this earth, let me see those private sights
Of your expanded mind, and then by death I’ll give back your soul
With my love as usury, that you may be that worshipped triple witness of heaven’s profundity.

Prelude #18

Calculated like a Moorish rug,
Consoling like slow summer wine,
Your words roll thick with swollen wilderness
Below your obsidian eyes aflame,

You're the holiness and loneliness of
Ascending stories sycamore-towered,
Whose stairs I weep on
Knowing this force is held in your dainty frame.

That I could hold that figure so tame,
And hear that nursing voice love my name,
That your smile would be my decades' refrain
While the firmness of our skin did slacken--

I would devote all my verse to you
If from your lips love's oath I heard,
Though I will commit mine to woe's flame
Knowing that its my youth you spurn.

Prelude #19

My love for you is self-love's guise—
I love you most through poet's eyes—
So if my love for you lacked verse,
I'd gain no pride and thus love terse,

So boast not that you've bliss-slain me,
Though God's blows have only matched thee.
How can you brandish your anlace
when to my pen its strength will trace?

Prelude #20

Death, if you be a never-ending waiting room,
with which boring God did you a contract assume?
Or was He romantic, by numbering our days,
So we’d write lovely lament, diseased with malaise?

If he’s just romantic, then we’re his research tools;
Though unjust, at least an attentive Yahweh rules.
As aloof Zeus, He’d cause both lovely mortal dread
and creative poems on unmeant pain till we’re dead.

Prelude #21

When I wake up and the sky is blushing purple,
I will know what she meant that one time
When she grazed my shoulder twice in class.

Prelude #22

Gaunt Shepherd, please peer from your worn widow cave,
Watch us balloon for a day then waste away
In the banquet of our growling lusts while
The drowsy wind strums your ribs to dust.

A shadowy blue encumbers our town's foilful shine
as our carnival ambitions twirl,
But don’t waste a look of rebuke
While we are busied in our delicious hurls

For soon by your feet, war-headlines
Will blow, whispering of Battalions.
Just pick them up to prepare to burrow
For when the fission staleness covers us thorough.

And when all you hear fidgeting men
Fighting for cans, then you'll know it’s almost done,
And when you hear gazing gardens of timid erections,
Then you can wean off to sleep's womb.

Prelude #23

All is echo from Zenith of Being—

Lemon tulips boil and brim—
Seas dry to dregs of summer pink and autumn orange—
Mars' shores fill with fiery sunset—

Thy Light refracts and fractals through—

Deadened nebulae spin off scintilla—
Aeolian dust of Zen lith doth Zing—then hum—
Zills oscillating—then hymn—

Thy Light refracts and fractals through
and pours absurd to me—
through my mind resounds enslaving Idyll Ecstasy—

Prelude #24

Your petal hair hides sepal eyes
and in my ken they're each revised
To one premiere of pure tepals
Since in soul's view difference appalls,
yet just as you combine to one
have us our own trite selfdom shun
to twine as tendrils wrapped in love,
and know our singleness thereof.