I

End

The ending is the beginning is the ending.
Between these two poles is where his home is standing.

Is where and is when his heart begins its beating
Within walls of time with echoes which are fleeting.

From contradiction a question is grown breathing,
Lays a flat land of answers entombed and wreathing.

Choosing one births first steps, amounts in believing,
Though untrue it construes objects for my reaving.

The ending is the beginning is the giving.
Between these two poles is where he tries his living.

II

Confusion in Beginning

Speak, I heard speak the other day.
Speak loud: style is a manner of thinking.
The way you lost and the new way.

It is not enough to avoid a stay.
The poison remains, stills the drinking.
Speak, I heard speak the other day

Of the path to moving on and flays
The old skin, leaves the corpse stinking.
The way you lost and the new way.

The emptiness of a past portrays
What only blind eyes get by blinking.
Speak, I heard speak the other day

Of remembering what we may
Remember. I can’t forget the ending,
The way you lost and the new way.

Keep this stack of notes and parlay
Them for future acts of beginning.
Speak, I heard speak the other day:
The way you lost and the new way.

III

Nuances of a Theme by W.B. Yeats

Though leaves are many the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun.
Now I may wither into the truth.

Dead the crickets are in October.
Sun-burnt face pale in Spring.
The tired feet will rest tomorrow,
After this is where we cling.

And it will, in its own way, in the end
Become meaningless to you —
The interest in growing older,
The new breed.

IV

Distraction

The cold trend tapers down. He rips his gloves,
Neglects the codes on whitewashed walls to write
The lines he traces and the lines he loves.

Believes no great secret drapes frozen sight.
Lends an ear-lined vision to burned hands,
Moving to see, and grandly cuts the light.

Drifting for waves admired from high strand,
He embarks the much discussed song-filled mission,
Attempting a thoughtless gesture, a new land.

The only problem being the poison
Which is his thinking. Thought will be clearer
When they have flattened his cushion:

This failed business of being a mirror.
Lock the doors, turn on the light above.
The vision’s closure comes, slowly comes nearer.

V

They

They slam the doors, their dumb bloated questions
They slam the doors,
and reclaim the function
To yield our age and face old stodgy bores.

No pleasure in hating these college years
No pleasure in hating
insipid tears
That squeeze our blood out a wooden grating.

We could not flee fetid waste passersby
We could not flee
they lick our smartness dry,
Hang us on boughs of their firm rooted tree.

They search to kill our life’s discrete statement
They search to kill
we hide in the casement
And await the stranger’s promise to fulfill.

VI

Kept

A forest, not only a body of trees,
Resonates with a past’s ponds in isolation,
Rising, to complicate a blunder.

Digging out the darnels has rooted out the wheat.

Letting it all go, the salt of Winter’s mood,
Is a mess toppling over, smothered under.

VII

This Dogged Route

In Persephone’s garden
She tends poppies fertile dead.
Gateside placed the warden,
He screams: “Sleep before you’re fed!”
Limbless Persephone plays
Melodies meant for mine ears,
A wish for dirt sleep in days,
Gathers no blunt sheafs of years.
Knowing how it all plays out.
And where it leads. Still it remains,
Must go on, this dogged rout,
Though the newfound pleasure’s pain
Would be better off not finding.
What sack of life awaits the grinding?

VIII

Ode

Stretch his warm spirit in the air longer
In tonight’s pleasant vices which plague him.
Abides the rank ripeness of the stronger,
Though it is time he tastes his loosened phlegm.
Fog stands in the way of his concubine,
The art of vile things smells the conjunction
Doubtful and worn, no way of connecting
The broken stones to make the singing line,
Breathe in an inspired test, serve the function,
Create the question of pure selecting.

Pierced time, the first breath makes him wail and cry.
And then the withered remains in ash trays,
Tongue smell of the shameful morning pigsty,
Knife in head, knows well the hangover daze.
Splattered book leaves cut and lie not there yet,
The closed door, chartreuse table cloth stained
By last night’s blood, viewed from coffins, finished,
The work is – he unlaced the tangled net.
Drank the stale water for which he bargained,
Never perfect therefore never blemished.

IX

Motives

Habit has inured your last fallen fruit.
Left behind before bitten, paid no mind
Sat rotting, spoiled before timely stewed.

No sense of an ending was never kind,
Your aged blue eyed boy has crumbled
To the point desire begged to be blind.

In that corner no act but he fumbled,
He missed the terror of loss known long,
But no steady rail when all have stumbled

So he chose to speak to himself in song.
It occupied him, he said it was fun,
If finished quickly it couldn’t go wrong.

So that’s what this is: a masked quiet hum;
It makes us better, makes our pain mute–
A useful fiction if lost I’d be done.

X

Begin

I’ve changed is what he says he said he said.
Already beginning the old story.

That weapon requires no created lead,
If resolutions dampen down their hurry.

But this too was futile instruction,
Another hopeless arc capturing time

To tell you what it meant from its destruction.
Release your concern whether the moments rhyme.

Outside will go on, go on, doesn’t die,
But will a home emerge where he can say I?