Songs Were for the Birds

A cento from Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.

—

Set in motion—
outward into the rain—
maroon albums
erode, though not surrendered.
Peaceful
into the eyes,
my lips blister
every minute to line
springfield water
along the western slopes,
and gloom as though
my disinterest to be content,
a river smooth.
Tell me
one notion
and give me
one iron hand.

Nomen

I. Cædmon
Write your words
and with them
pierce through
nebulous conceit;
wade through the
fantastic and find
truth to speak
and speak it.

II. Julian
You sit in your
self-made isolation,
apart from the world
and worldly things,
as people beseech
your intercession;
and guilt will not
overcome your purpose.

III. Cordelia
He reviles you
and yet still
you act as though
he reveres you,
for you understand
that he has
but an infection
of his humours.

IV. Beatrice
Will your spleen
consume the things
of which you hold
close to your heart?
Your ill-repute
drives him away
when you so dearly
wish it would not.

Escalating like/yesterday’s bills

piled on the
kitchen table with
good intentions
never realized
but thought of
often in vain
attempts to make
good promises
shattered with
the realities that
life offers the
naive who would give
of themselves
without disdain or
dissatisfaction
if only to create
some kind of
impression on the
landmass.

Wilde Times

Your portrait hangs on my papered wall,
framed pretentiousness
with cape around your shoulders
and hat tipped to one side
as though you divine
that you are a superfluous man
and do not care, and
furthermore, embrace the
distinction. Your eyes inform
against you, however, and betray
the ennui that has become your
life from too many dalliances.
And yet, you do not seem to
care, as I do not care.

Lingering

Timidity gives rise to
anxious dissonance,
thousands of tone-fractals
clustered, dissipate,
subvert the ear to
belligerent response,
freely flowing from
severe pizzicato to the
strains of music at once
performed many years ago:
one can never return
without consequence of
missed musicality of
young virtuosity.

Of the Pre-Raphaelites

Sanctity of the
written word—
art rendered in
stroke of brush,
insight, set down
in permanence
with drops of
zeitgeist blackened
on the gold-blue
horizon of Art
for Art’s Sake,
while Rossetti-women
cry out pious
platitudes from
reverent poses, classical
glimpses of a
fraternity long tied
with Nature’s artifice
and her sympathies.

Night is Most Beautiful

when musty dew collects on
grass beneath bare toes;

when stars eclipse the crisp air,
sentinels of private acts;

when voids are filled with silent
understanding between friends;

when purple hues glow tender
over warm gusts of wind.

Night is most beautiful.

Anatomy of Love

Mingled fluid-blight should taint,
clouding mind from reasoned act
as aching sores and cankers pull
at breast in vital force to rapture,
rupture desire from the inner-depths
of cavity in the deeper things
and corpulence affecting; in fevered
conduct, you ravage me to submission
because I can do no more than succumb
to your noxious will and live out my
days in anemic reserve, flaccid to the
touch and lusterless to the eye
for you have infected me with
an abscess of the heart.

Sapienta

“The story about Thales is a good illustration, Theodorus: how he was looking upwards in the course of his astronomical investigations, and fell into a pothole….” —Plato

Wisdom,
it is said,
is a
symbiosis
between
genius and
insanity.
I do not
know by
whom it
was said,
but that does
not negate
the quality
of the
afore-
mentioned,
do you not
agree?
For one
who is so
entranced
by a thing
that he
disregards
the common
to which all
subscribe
and believe,
he remains
oblivious
to the
normalities
that life
offers.
Is there
madness
entrenched
within
brilliance?
Or is it
merely a
convoluted
diatribe,
a teetering
obelisk
turned
on its
end?

On the Mythology of Wit

“The five senses [wits]; also, sometimes, the five qualities or faculties,
common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory.” —Geoffrey Chaucer

—

I diminish into the practicality of
pence and sterling when I envision
the imminent, oppressed by a sense
of responsibility such as with the
rule of soundness that is within us all.
—
You arrest the constellation of my wits
with wraiths of fantastic preoccupation,
Moira who would knit us together with
the fabric of celestial bodies that once
illuminated the hyaline in splendor.
—
I war upon your ignorance, feints
of intellect concealed. Why do you
eclipse the worlds inside? My sword
will pierce the convoluted hysteria
that you proudly display.
—
You, of the cumulus, hanging above
my sentiment as nor’eastern wind
guides the wave crashing planks
of bifurcated lumber, discerning fresh
splinter from the barren driftwood.
—
I remember the earthen vessel,
cloven recollection of things
that were and echoes of things
that might have been in the
warm fecund soil beneath my feet.