a scrawl upon a wall
white walls and walks

light largely yellow 
lounging from lamps

a cat leaps for the scrawl
reaches, falls

looks into a corner
looks casual

begins grooming
so suavely supple 

bolder than light 
and supple 

belated piety 
       In a castle museum

christ nests 
upon a toad
no
it is a dragon
and christ is 
on top

not toad but 
dragon

not squashed
(really)
by divine repose

just there
    under
tail curling around 
the corner

no heads crushed 
nor heels bruised
a friendly seating
mutually beneficial 
through centuries
since carver 
set chisel
to stone

the apocalypse would
come a nasty shock 
to both
should the optimistic atoms 
of their stone fall 
for the lake of fire
who,
it's been said, is one hell 
of a seducer

she said
i haven't heard anyone
use that word
in ages

i said
good words become
lost:
fusty, nookshotten
lost

then i said
that words want to be 
lived
and if sent to the trash heap
of language detritus
they turn restive ghosts
wreaking havoc
in our cellars and dreams

the streetlamp
- slighted pumpkin wallowing aloft -
has not faltered 
through the morning distended
into an afternoon suspended 
         in thought
of crouching night's 
         encroaching

never so dull 
a day
has pocked November's 
skull
inverted largely over the horizon

but behind the blackening blind
of my sweet sarcophagus
grapes lounge 
in candle twilight
while Schoenberg shrills
and books crawl 

            softly

While autumn sidles on impending deadlines hiss in the slippery byways of crammed days and insensate nights sounding silence. But beyond my cage trees yawn in fog and breezes whistle by the jagged teeth of leaves. No sight of sky sneaks through the canopy of those vein-dead frenzies, crisp and soon-falling. Blood-burrows in the sky, distant prisoned hills. Licked rock resides beneath swift running of water’s caress. Sparking light flicks in the meeting of moisture and air. Soft breezes. Soft grass.  

Now hear the  the silence, the echoing ways where wends the wind over the holy mountain wholly sheer and ragged, barring no feeble heaven, but rather puncturing the skin of night to greet encumbered stars. If beneath these ways of the webbed universe’s twirling, if over the molten core on which we prance, if by rainway and leafpath and snowscuttle we may follow, then follow oh follow. May the musk of sky and the riot of perishing leaves, may that ineffable scent conjuring a hundred days of autumnal perfection, may all the inexpressible beauty of the world puncture the dull routine, annihilate the false conundrums and silly considerations concealing crystalline depths of life. 

"It were a goodly storie, to declare,
By what straunge accident faire Chrysogone
Conceived these infants, and how them she bare..."
- Edmund Spenser
from The Third Booke of The Faerie Queene

here sit
here bathe
in pooling currents
of sunlight
drenching my  front step
from which, if off I step,
I shall be brushed
by the overgrown shrub
tickling wayward passersby

and if off this step
I should take my way
take endless more
if I should say, wherever I may roam…
still this October day
shall be my home
this sun-fucked
dappled day

wings shed the skin of night
feathers cast off shredded light
sparrow, won’t you stay?

stay sparrow

stay, stay here
where ceiling punctures sky
where grass greets concrete slices
where starbeams lick lengthening stases

stay sparrow

leave me not where bulbs burn sharply
leave me not where screens beam grimly
draw me through the skin of night
dress me in soft rags of light

stay sparrow stay 

a watermelon splits in swelter
and splashes withered faces
smacking day’s rind
lipping desiccated desire 

Here a space, hidden cavern receding from underneath the sliding skin of marching, second-ticked moments, tickled present dotted down the stretching line of time-spanned day.

There is a second in every day that, found, can never be quantified and lost, can never be discovered by those prowling, precise watch-fiends.

I have searched in the dells and behind the trees of Brescia hill: here is a labyrinth-bathed tree from up whose gorgeously-mottled trunk falls diffuse illumination. 

There is a second in every day blooming into a vastness beyond day.

Fall off the path of accustomed treadings.
Forsake known ways.
Wander into gemmed grasses.