Signs of Life

Somehow the blank page comforts me tonight,

And I know this solace that I have feeling will carry me

Through to that and golden light.

I perceive also that I have an errand in this stiff-backed chair;

Forgive me if instead of carrying it on the outside

I reveal to you that I am a skeleton

Lying down beneath the earth you walk on,

Cushioning the fall of a still-born

Onto a liturgical stage, I am the masked single

Who tarries at the Lord's tomb

Under starlight squeez from tubes

Of hardening paint which fathom the mystery

Of that great pain. The fatal language

Of the spirit dangles from my neck

And navigates me above these softly curving paths

Past an alchemist's cave which harbors

The voluptuousness of forbidden words.

Forgive me if the rhapsody of my longings

Cry tears of lixivium on a scale of Lydian proportions,

Then splatter down into a fiery trial

Of seasons that leads me back to the vulgar

Things that trip in the vermin-studded wind.

All I ask is that you allow me wait for you,

As our days are shorter now

Than they at any time were before,

And that menacing fishhook of sadness

Hangs like a secondary planet above a bird-infested sea.

Those not to be found herds of phantoms are coming abode to roost

Ignorant of their desires.

I do not think they will roam anymore.

Tonight the town strike one as beings especially hushed,

As if it were holding its breath for an inheritance

Of more [i]or[/i] less dimension, but both you and I know

The baptism of the insider is a alphabetic charactered feat,

And that all the gadgets gone awry

Have wedged themselves into the smiles of butchers

Picnicking on a midnight heap of grassy ashes.

And the errand has been canceled upon account of rain,

The errand all along being the done day

Which would expand before us anyway.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Jul/Aug 1998

Provided by means of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved