POETRY
Great Reflector
___________
Contents:
01. New Covenant
02. Endless
03. The Only Kind
04. Orbital Paths
05. Contact
06. Great Reflector
07. Eraser of Histories
08. Marginal Synesthesia
09. Hyper-Sleep Hyperbole
10. Aspirations of a Lesser God
11. Nightmare Catcher
___________
New Covenant
Draft a new agreement;
with ink
and paper,
set the course.
Envelope hope within the umbra
and view the crescent
as something other than the
scythe.
I will accept your gifts no longer…
You are a figment.
A malignant manifestation.
A glitch in the mental-margin,
submerged somewhere in the cellular-abyss
of the complex-eye.
Topographic façade.
A tensile net cast upon eternity,
collecting desires of a dying breed.
Matriarch; heir to all the heavens knowable domain.
Shifting the door that is perception,
into subtle, negotiable doses.
Showing one face,
saving another.
Processing in facsimile,
a suitable vision of eternity.
We don’t dare see without technologies
wrought on the irrefutable-stage of conspiracy.
A fretwork of blackouts
And covert pacts.
Perpetuation of myth.
Perpetually perpetuating the myths.
You are perpetrator, of myth.
Reclaim your illusions!
Great Queen!
Manipulate the changing molecules inside us.
Pull our controls with effortless-urge.
Disturb the dormancy of mountains and oceans and populations.
Recalculate the cartography of all recorded history.
Forge a delineation of scale within an infinite region.
Your power permeates,
to decipher the lie
of all of space
and all of time…
As the inborn;
the ego,
overshadows nebula,
Compounding galaxies into
adolescent-integers.
We need not sow our seeds so deeply.
Faith and hope,
matter not to what is written.
She grows because her nature is growth.
Dogma does not dictate.
She is an ever-becoming organism.
The histrionics of our great sages
have little effect.
She is all that is forever.
Wisdom is wasted in her shadows.
She prescribes to no known measure.
And, if you stray but a percent,
one degree,
even a slight-tip of your present angle…
All will be lost.
You will be the first to see the universe stripped-bare,
when constancy and consistency are challenged by the relative.
You will be the first to view the collapse of eternity as a concept,
when striking back against the current, the blackness halts within an instant.
You will be the first to know that forever’s charge was not sustained,
when the reserve is depleted and the ageless-light discovers it’s demise.
Despite this axiom of power,
our gift to you is negligence.
How mundane.
You are for granted.
You are forgotten.
Your constant dim-light, nagging…
Yet, somehow…
You are forgettable.
And I fear no day greater,
then the one that ends in a night,
needless of translation.
When your soothing-tongue is heard
by one and all,
For the first time in a millennia,
proclaiming…
All, is lost.
____________
Endless
Endlessness…
and, at the end,
imposition.
Burden of the waning-crescent.
Centered upon axis; shifting-North.
Satellite against the forces
of a routine gravity.
Seeking community at the fringe of expansion.
Watching traditions calcify and crumble.
Rocky, leaking, monolithic-body.
Spherical ship fastened to the shore,
of this; crystalline,
dark-matter.
I must admit,
I fear the loss of longing.
“You must forget, try to forget…
The monsters, so needy for your attention.”
Will they be muted,
tongues severed and set about a reckless eternity?
Will I know the silencing
of the great symphony of endless
-increase into the void?
Will I be made to see this thing I worship
without end, for all it’s
curves and edges?
Only then, will the eye become a compass.
Only then, will the hand become a tool.
Only then, will the heart become an engine.
For now I am set upon the harshly-angled horizon,
its forever-fading-lines, and,
ultimately imperceptible perspective.
This is where the eternal are humbled
by the eternity they claim to know.
This is where beliefs are challenged
by the endless acquisition of knowledge.
This is where I have become, not only
myself; but the other.
Seeking new foundations
among the continental waves.
Seeking new meanings
among the shifting landscapes.
Seeking new obsessions
among the wavering planets.
I’ve come to know curiosity,
and to question my reflections.
I think I’m seeing things…
Specters of the elliptical sentence,
Phantoms of the eternal limb,
Visions of the coming eclipse.
Fantastic animals reside on my dark-side;
the iconoclasts of human ingenuity,
endeavoring to monetize the cosmic-black.
Theorems and proofs
have made our collective dreams the minotaur
of the quotidian labyrinth…
Buried down and deep…
Past the leaden gate and all stone chambers,
through the corridor and beyond the great hall,
in a cell the diagram does not indicate;
a narrow place, deviant of the architect’s intentions…
Walls without pretension,
now whittled with scrimshawed stories that challenge
the myths of dead sailors.
Walls without affectation,
burdened by the hieroglyphs of a thousand tattered lifetimes
lived in a pantheon of inches.
Walls without meaning,
become a terrible museum of all the worlds great horrors
collected in galactic-silence.
A space that fold’s space into space,
and then in again and on itself,
bending, and contracting,
and constricting,
until the soot births
the purest of all prisms.
Inconceivable and unnamable.
All-absorbent, yet non-reflective.
Cauldron and crucible;
for the spectrum of darkness.
Darkness has become
the matter,
where the limit is light.
Darkness is all
that matters,
when the limit is light.
It is unquantifiable,
in this darkened; endless state…
It is impalpable,
as senses are foiled by the dust of dying stars…
It is indescribable;
in any tongue that doesn’t forge its inflection in symbols…
But I can offer you one truth.
A singular truth.
The only truth we need.
In some intangible way,
We are limited
by the light.
___________
The Only Kind
Paranormal activation
of outside entities-
lingering…
Absorbed by the vibration
of unknown, comforting tongues.
Paralytic telepathy;
telegraphing symbology on ice-cold fingertips.
In multiples of foreign number-signs
it comes forcefully,
this harvest time.
Planets of intelligence descending,
Above.
Planets of intuition lamenting,
Above.
Ancient mountain movers.
Architects of deception…
Rivaling the present tense of science and discovery,
with simplified technologies.
Simplify.
“Please, simplify.”
Wintry-tongues;
Docile, dormant.
Veins pulsating, ravenous with heat.
Sharpening hibernation to an epic pike.
A point and a place, magnetic.
Stores are lessening.
The humdrum becomes heightened; magnified as monuments.
The internal struggle calcifies an obelisk,
an envious structure,
moved only by great armies.
Moments do not pass; they gather.
Here, and there,
and everywhere,
the same.
Some phantasmal trauma,
perpetrated by extinct apparitions.
When all is still,
and your breath is smoke,
They come.
Traveling distance in a whisper,
via infinite passages
of occult beckoning.
For the essential,
curiosity.
Your impressive scale,
was no deterrent.
You are not a shield.
Visitation is no longer
catalogued, categorized, or systematized.
They are here.
___________
Orbital Paths
Altered-ego
you are not my self
and I,
am not your other.
There is a missing piece of us.
Distorting the coordinates of our
triangulation.
Let us now resort to deciphering
the complex codices of our shared-demons.
Locked away and misled.
Seeking relief from stone entanglement,
austere in palette.
Elite.
Our angles lie in exquisite comas.
Somewhere off, dreaming of
dimensions we cannot comprehend.
Our angels rendered helpless, by the reality of eternity.
Higher-beings forced to contemplate
the self,
to see themselves,
at the grade of astronaut.
Represented in reflections,
and artists hand.
We can never be free.
So, I suggest we share this orbit,
in the confidence we lack as insular bodies.
Trade guidance from the empty-well,
for extraterrestrial parchment papers,
and cease the dead-end revival
of mummified theologies.
You are,
unwilling to be known.
Messages displaced.
You are,
unwilling to be known.
Messages misplaced.
Retreat to silent hovering
as I build the babbling tower;
constructed with the care
of enslaved lifetimes.
You are not as you seem.
Is your light a beacon
or a borrowed effigy?
You are not what you seem.
Vanguard of my lifelong evening.
You once relieved the crisis of loneliness.
Alas, this moment has passed.
Vanity renders you stoic.
Need grows more sophisticated,
more complex.
I am moved.
Moved along the cosmic-path.
Intergalactic-jury of constellations hangs me.
This connection is a vault with vaulted ceilings…
Ever-changing oculus.
Orchestration of altered-light.
Undeniable focus around You.
Impact eminent.
Coil unraveling.
Collision inevitable.
Orbit tightening.
You,
forever.
You.
You are forever.
Eons of unrest.
Helplessly and hopelessly troubled;
addicted to your orbit.
I’ve written of your musings,
and reproduced your image
in all terrestrial mediums…
Yet, I cannot intervene.
I cannot alter the ebb,
and flow;
or the dust-laden tide and vacuous-frequencies
of your cell.
You are a slave.
Burdened with one,
darkened-eye
set to view the stars ceaseless escape.
Sentenced by happenstance,
to know only ancient-
light.
___________
Contact
At great distances,
too desolate to impart;
not here, not in words…
Devices speculate and take,
measurements.
To integrate a silent knowledge
among this dormant blanket-land.
The edge of spheres lay barren,
as they bathe in atmospheric light.
Lingering as one awaits instruction,
from the other
and another,
to quantify this mystery of sight.
Quaint to my perception,
Naked-eyes see great detail.
Capturing within this gaze,
a message
of eventual return.
Spun out upon that distant ocean
by an impact meaningless,
pure.
The orphaned son of Earthly shores.
Prodigal.
Resting in darkness.
Half-whole.
Caught in visual embrace.
Monolith,
Pawn.
Stranger,
Friend.
Ego,
Id.
Self,
Other.
I cannot know you.
But, I know I’ve found you.
My eyes do not deceive me.
I know,
I found you.
My dying wish…
Tell me, tell me now…
that you have not assimilated
to this loneliness.
Tell me I have not sought without end,
only to meet my end,
alone?
Animate!
Speak!
___________
Great Reflector
Recant!
Great Reflector!
You!
Obfuscator of the obscure,
fearing obsolescence.
You!
Transgressor of transparency,
passing through walls.
You!
Designer of all crypticisms,
conspiring without end.
…accurate within a millimeter…
Resign!
Great Reflector!
Behemoth!
Light shimmering through your bowels
from devoured worlds.
Leviathan!
Pulling-planks and shearing-hulls
of expired voyages.
Goliath!
Hulking aimlessly through orbits
with tired motives.
…homing-in on radar-screens…
Relinquish!
Great Reflector!
I see you as you stumble,
along the pushing current.
Flying high and lifeless.
Caught up in your own fables.
Needy for a strangers love,
and stranger things.
Stranger still…
is your desire to hide
among the intervening light.
My insatiable need
feeds your ornamental frequency.
I know my part in this…
My heart is the pantheon
of all lost places,
buried below
your stolen luminance.
Perhaps it is…
that we share this alone.
A common tongue.
A style of speech.
A way with words.
Feigned necessities.
Pretentious collaborations.
Contrived endeavors.
We are sister satellites,
But our relationship is weakening.
You carry my burden along the celestial path
without reservation;
an illiterate,
a slave…
On your surface;
I see projected,
everything I despise in myself.
Seduced from that secret place…
drawn, quartered, flayed
and stretched-
over the marred infrastructure
of chasms, canyons,
and caverns.
The elasticity of my stories, challenged.
The malleability of my theories, disputed.
The plasticity of my being, tested.
You’re simply not to blame.
It’s simply not your fault.
I’ve cast endless dispersions
in your direction.
But you’re not a filter,
Or a portal,
Or a lens…
You’re the taciturn speculator
of all ontologies,
and the bane of all technologies.
Definer and defier
of all dimensions.
The sphere and the disc.
Nothing but a mirror.
The confidant of every victory and fluke,
and intermediate stage of evolution.
You are the,
Great Reflector!
___________
Eraser of Histories
Parallax.
Please,
corrupt the truth.
Frame the vision I’ve worked to set astray.
Prepare the proper satellites.
Make her
central and observable.
Hermetic matriarch.
Set to inebriate the stubborn-
pedagogy of flatness,
rubric of edges,
and accession of angles.
Paradox.
Please,
deconstruct the truth.
Develop the paradigm of modern mythologies and mysticisms.
Prepare the proper devices.
Make her
clear and detectable.
Maiden of all hoaxes.
Haunting the physical-line of sight.
Calming me with complex deciphering
of tainted images
and documents.
Parable.
Please,
recalculate the truth.
Conspire to convince me of your fables,
prepare the proper testaments.
Make her
focal and apparent.
I am witness to your perfect reflection.
Defiant of all distortion.
Native surfaces raise questions about your meaning,
and your name.
Have we misjudged the shape of our reality?
Have our eyes; complex as giants minds, fooled us?
Have our sleepwalking theories been proven wrong?
I’ve seen you cast out and set upon the task of devising a volume too vast to be conceived in part or parcel, too great to be contained on the grandest prison-planet, too incomprehensible to maintain the charge of even half of all imaginable lifetimes; an exponential beast too distant for measure; in logarithm, algorithm, theorem, proof, or dissertation.
Deviating concubine.
Corrupting sensible contemplations.
Changing dimensions,
to look the same
and feel alike.
Completely disemboweling all mystic creatures.
Extinguishing galaxies, and collapsing stars.
Removing imagination from the course of eternity.
To make us one,
knowable,
and named.
___________
Marginal Synesthesia
Intervening apparition.
Conjurer.
My most mischievous friend.
“Pretender!”
Expose to me;
the secrets of archaic building strategy,
the myths of underworld endeavors,
the stone codex of mystic makers.
Save nothing
for the chest within my chest.
Pantheons: Parliaments: Panopticons.
Design without invention.
Discovered, tooled within the rock.
Together,
we will conspire.
We shall conspire,
to synthesize the margins.
To hide and make distant,
the truths of truths…
And be learned like no other
and be gods,
among men.
……
Now, at our call,
all things imaginary will
condense into one apocalyptic form.
New industries will participate
and pull currencies from the riverbed.
Bellies turn to oil.
We will see ourselves.
We will know ourselves.
Conducted by the luscious, bloody silt
and grain, and crystal.
Formulaic-solvent.
Alchemy.
A child’s game, a parlor trick.
We’ve chosen the most mystical of beasts
to light the cacophonic countryside.
To see ourselves illuminated.
Hung above, like sneaky constellations
in weighty-metal-giants.
……
Now we must make a change.
Filter back through language,
for signs of how they came…
and perpetuated stories that led to stories, and further stories still.
Static oration, made history.
Cloudy vocalization, made scripture.
Intangible declaration, made tradition.
Our birthplace, our origin.
Now a tongue we cannot name,
reserved for those among us, untamed.
We cannot claim to understand.
So, hypnotize and illustrate…
We have the technology.
Polygamous-polygraphs set to circumcise and circumscribe
lives left open to the possibility of folding-time.
You see it is,
that we, are not alone.
Urged along this delicate curve by those we cannot fully conceive
in the dimensional fluke that gave us monument, innocence,
gospel, and rhetoric.
They left us here.
Some weak and few ready.
To copulate and calculate,
and return home complete.
Yet, in our endless endeavor to be,
we have chosen the most mystical of beasts,
and used greed to render them
a myth.
___________
Hyper-sleep Hyperbole
I think I know why I’m here;
to challenge the change,
and sway the tidal frequency.
To freely and frequently communicate with the
unknown,
the unsung.
My devices are set.
Calibrated by the greatest minds of our time.
I think I know why I’m here;
to speak with voices of the mountain peoples.
Those living in strange endeavor,
among the constant seismic-shifting.
Nestled by the intrepid forces of an altering planet
and it’s quaint and brutal surfaces.
Builders of great fortresses,
designed to guide the sun and
alter shadows;
to tell the time
and help to hide,
from the great bird.
The insipid bird;
the above proclaimed as deity.
A shadow, only a shadow;
upon their souls.
A fear they have created
to find the will to live…a purpose.
This is where I wake.
Down beside where I awoke,
Blanketed; undoubtedly, by time,
yet, the same.
Or, similar.
An empty vessel.
Now baked with afternoon suns
and weathered by the torment of alien torrents.
Traveler!
Assassin!
I have so many names.
Yet, I do not know why I’ve come here.
My devices deviate with silt and sand.
Mechanical cognitions become diametrically opposed.
My allowances and newfound calculus
unable to account,
for the imposed barometer of the foreign
landscape, which has proven more powerful
than simulation, preparation, and
all emblems of patriotism.
“My God, How I miss the atmosphere…the scent…
The things we change for fear of never-changing…
God!?
My God???”
The expedition is creeping into my mind.
That’s the only explanation.
I find now, that I’m not sure they’re here at all
or…again, where here is…
Or, if here, even is, at all.
My confidant confounds me,
as she sways with sisters too many
to be named.
Distant misanthropy.
Cosmic bodies homogenize to fool us;
humankind.
They dance, again and again and again…
in parallaxes, to distort the premise of our sight
and render claims of greatness,
and godliness,
and all things worthy of worship.
After all, what would we be without the stars,
upon which to muse…?
And lay,
in not such subtle-doses
our treasures, mysteries, and conspiracies
never few?
I find this so irregular…
To be stranded with a sense of purpose;
gone about the business of an entire race,
as endless days have passed in common function…
and the past, for me, was a slumber…
so deep I can’t recall a dream…
or a working sensation,
or a way to quell the fear;
that the changing light,
rustle of night,
and carving upon the rock
are more than a symbol
of his arrival,
his eventual return.
Great bird.
Alas…
I have unlocked the riddle.
An ever-changing beast of myth,
whose power sheds upon the universe that contains
the universe,
must surely crave delights from all its edges.
I then;
My great mission…
I; avatar of all humanity.
Great explorer, astronaut, martyr…
All my investment, endeavor,
and claims to freedom…
Part of a whole and steady-trajectory
fashioning up and over, to one steady orbit.
To end up here.
When activity is slight,
and our conventional wisdoms mean nothing.
For there is nothing,
to conquer or concur.
You see,
I think I know why I’m here…
We share a common ghost.
___________
Aspirations of a Lesser God
Edifice is artifice.
Concurrent and recurrent,
moving only with the current hand.
Widening the scope of
changing weather…
A hobby for the cosmic.
Change, manipulation…
Linkages of an epic succession,
none weaker than the next.
Strengthened by the distortion of accounts;
a deliberate convolution of oral-histories,
set to anesthetize the young.
Antithesis of any physics,
or known dimensionality.
A watch built of fashioned parts,
from dust contaminated by the
desires of dinosaurs.
Prehistoric. Prehensile. Premature.
Signals sent aloft in numbered years we cannot conceive.
The thoughts of extinct beings made concrete in matter…
Skilled travelers, traversing the limits,
and latitudes of our new,
beloved knowledge.
Challenging intellect with ideas preceding the abstract.
So primitive, yet so advanced.
Canvases unstretched, and dripped, and bent.
A simple image, seen from all sides.
Simultaneity of form and function.
Tricks of light, and dark, and modeling
of figure and flesh, godlike.
Decadence made beautiful; grotesque.
Towers and monuments, and textiles…
Patterns drenched in silk and silt.
The pulse that gave us modernity.
Imagine.
The very first thought, ever thought.
The first idea, remembered.
The last fish laid bare upon the rocks and sand, for
the dream of humanity.
The billionth labored gasp, made breath.
The hidden will to stand, and move, and change.
Containing concepts before the printed book.
Calculating frequencies before the metronome.
Conspiring theologies before the blessed pulpit.
Concept.
Atlantis, Valhalla, Pangaea.
Dream, Ideal, Speculation.
The romance that preceded nation and state.
The catalyst that spewed the veins of doctrine.
The instinct that grew and became insight.
You’ve watched it all;
with your slowly blinking eye.
Every victory and severity.
Adaptation and extinction.
No gasp, no applause.
…silence…
Impartial. Indifferent. Indefensible.
Relocated; son.
Absentee; father.
Surrogate; god.
___________
Nightmare Catcher
I don’t sleep the same.
At times,
I don’t sleep at all.
Static permeates the monochrome.
A message?
Entertainment histories
quickly became my confidant.
Rhetoric and gesture from a time,
before my time.
The trivial passing from my lips as trivia.
My only guide through and to the light.
The simplest stories haunt me;
histories written in future tense.
Stationed deep within the musculature of my mind.
And here I am, paralyzed, changed,
by the sound,
and the promise.
Bound to a gift I may not need or want.
“They will be there, for you. Forever.”
So I look to you, brother…
as a compass,
for some way to navigate the night.
I imagine you as a field, a magnet.
I pray there is some convention to their designs;
some way of knowing,
some form of defense.
That our fictions are meaningful,
and our heroes are adequate.
You know them.
You are from their region, their zone.
That place between places.
That silent, stretching hallway.
The great curving-monolith.
You’ve been for me,
the things others can’t truly be.
Gargantuan child.
Inquisitive monster.
Petulant satellite.
Your great amusement is our muse.
I love you…
without division or condition.
I love you.
Your gift for destruction and resurrection,
and possession of ancient and unknowable beasts.
Your bruised architecture,
and giant caverns, mountains, and scales.
Your ability to move water like renewable walls,
and to turn sand to the teeth of gigantic sharks.
Your utter disregard for our standards,
and tireless attempts to cleanse.
You allow us to rebuild,
to save ourselves,
and to be greater still.
For this, I love you.
Yet, I feel abandoned;
as you go through your predictable phases.
So we remove the dust from great projections.
Tilling ruins as a pastime,
To see the conjecture of innocent eyes.
To revel in the view of the ancients, and primitives,
and tribal peoples.
As I lay down to sleep,
I envision the possibility
and potential,
of actually knowing you.
I see the fatal flaw…
I see it so clearly now.
You are as real, as you are imaginary.
I can know you in facsimile, melody, and verse.
But we can never truly touch.
All acceptable proximities, measurements,
and diagrams are a consolation prize.
…air, and alloy, and buttons, and glass, and gauges, and gyroscopes, and lights, and meters, and plastic, and straps, and switches, and tubes…
I am slave to the membrane;
the prophecy of my atmosphere,
the delicately balanced cage of
polyester and oxygen.
I won’t ask you to commit.
I can’t just ask you to commit.
Not with the atrophied arm of gravity as
a singular assurance.
The nuptials are clear;
my body is grand,
but you are forever, the mystic.
So, I will continue to speculate,
until you grow tired,
or I see you canonized.
Until then,
I can’t go deeper.
I can’t see the bottoms of your trenches,
or the wonders of your canyons.
Until then,
I can’t go deeper.
My meditations won’t lead to enlightenment,
or peace.
Until then,
I can’t go deeper;
And I still won’t be able to sleep,
at least not the same.
So friend;
until then…
___________