the day smells of charcoal
& summertime
is lush with overwhelming heat
& the memory
of faraway dreamscapes
new spiritual riches
& the sentient pushing on
of all that breathes
or reaches for the sun

your voice
alone
in the humid sphere
of competing
midnights
ancient unswerving
clarion ready
to unravel the monsoon
or burn away
its floods
with a whisper

these days everything bends toward conspiracy

—the wealth of nations the family bound
by democratic ideals as applied the outliers
united in opposition to time’s flow
the problems the solutions the stories
that recount what is or is not yet known—

all at once both natural & unnatural

—we are each of us a conspiracy of tendencies
the adopted pragmatic mischief of semi-
conscious cellular life an organized adventure
in unification toward culture toward elevation
a demonstration of the conscious capable self—

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if your road is wine-dark & you drink
& your blood is sunlight & swimming

if the little freedoms that form you
taste like clean winter air

if the whole of time finds itself & disappears
in the geometry of your breath

if you are prone to becoming
those things you always doubted

if genuflection is an artform
& you place all questions inside it

if politics brings in equal measures
epiphany & raucous fatigue

if elegance identifies itself in you
but you refuse to answer the call

if mirrors frighten & distill your neurons
one by one until you flee

if dragonflies look like holy vessels
& you pray to the sheen of their wings

if fame is one of many myths
gathered in your fist like grapes

if the will is a symphony performed
by all that your mind has not touched

if morning has no meaning beyond
the scents you ascribe to morning

if repetition is the name of doubt
& you believe at your center

if everything is faith or faith’s envoy
& faith is an insurmountable fact

if a window can contain infinities
& the self is a window

then safely you might describe your
rootless nocturnal ruminations as human

& you are suited to improvise a love
with which to trim & shatter obstacles

& the universe is moving toward you
with an invitation to the day

Landscape of desire
timing and fluctuation
all the improbable flurried tasking
we undertake thinking
that nothing else can be
or can be justified
or can be ours
to own and savor
the gaunt topography
of willing beyond
the shadows
and the sifting of
impermanent colossal pretensions
made of sand…

In the wake of slanting dipping and departing years
the flow and reprisal of unfettered commitment

in the afterdealing and backslip of having tasted
the nostalgia that is inception and incendiary

in the tiring of impenetrable distance and imagining
the dictates of what is lacking and most essential

the name of longing is one name and one gaze
a glistening amber indulgence that spells and savors eternity

the language of all that was once given
and in a million other lives will not let providence slip…

we share
a cramped space
because we have chosen it
because we desire
one another’s
stilted
unwavering
company

mish-mash of gazes
crossing
knowing
the turmoil
of deliberate unison

because with all the space
& the filter
& inflation
of the ‘known’ world
we have come to prefer
corners
proximities
sojourn

we have come to know
there is a taste of sojourn
in our sharing
of cramped spaces…

our universe
pure will moving
a collective intelligence
a systematically accidental
teamwork
phenomenon

life
wherever conditions permit
seems to have cropped up

& we
the frail thinking
low-voltage
creatures
whose minds
each a metaphysic
a microcosm
mimic the whole

we the ‘stardust’
that we are
we think & struggle
to have proper
individual wills
to control
to decide

we must remember the void
stumble upon it
midstream
complain of strange
psychic vacuity
depression

we must ‘invent’
the ‘concept’
zero

to aid us
in our archival crusade
against difference
impenetrable singular
inflation

with the small
measured steps
of scientific proceeding
we seek to take control
to make red giants
or supermassive interstellar
cumulus
bundles for surviving
our own eventual
combustion

but our bodies
are able to contain
& manage only so much
of the cosmic will
before the circuitry
is overwhelmed

& we forget
we aspire
to forget
that we very well might
collapse under the weight
of all that we have
tried to assimilate
diminish & categorize

we forget
that the will
might not want us to
act

that our rebellion
might be squashed

that we may be fated
to become the very
singularity
at the center of a darkness
which has always been

the focus of all our wheeling
pained specieal amnesia
& discovery…