1. SEMEN DRIED INTO THE SILENCE OF ROCK AND MINERAL

Useless blood swayed by sunken moons
The misty sun is grown a dimmer gold
Where beauty with her doom conspires
To tell in flame what death and beauty mean
In a burnt land of ashes
Winter and silence and woe have come
Semen dried into the silence of rock and mineral
Silence all-attending and supreme


2. ENDLESS MOTHS SWARMING

The burdens of embodiment and contingency
Omnipresent delimiters
An obsidian tower at every quadrant
Blood and flesh are the parody of desire
Lust is the plea before the executioner
Endless moths swarming
Golems of spoiled food and excrement
I have seen vases and polished brass
Reflect black windows
The gardener’s lichen’s human scream


3. THE INEXPRESSIBLE LONELINESS OF THINKING

The influence of repulsion
A continuity of nothingness
Mind betrays body
Body betrays mind
See us from outside
Vast worms knotted by habit
Vast chains to hold us down
The failure of intimacy
The impossibility of power
The inexpressible loneliness of thinking
The beast obscured by black dusk


4. FLUX AND PERMANENCE

The murdered innocence of the sea
Flux and permanence
The wave’s black banners break endlessly
The wolves of water that howl along our coast
The live red flame of sunset eating the dead blue sky
The sun-spangled blood of the woods
Broken souls and bodies ruinous
Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal
Meaningless as a burnt scroll
that blackens with the passing of the fire


5. REFUSING A HEAVENLY MANSION

Refusing a heavenly mansion
Raging in the dark
But in the deserts of night and cold and void
Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings
I saw a city where each house stood
On a rock between black seas
Solitude may rust your words


6. THE FIRE OF THIS

I cannot find a way through love and through
To lose this ever-aching loneliness in vaster solitude
Only a locked door
The long remorse
Vanished incommunicable moods
The dolor in the bells of blinded lands
The thousand-chorded monotones of pain
Locked doors without keys
Prisons without and prisons within
Labyrinths of newsprint
Coiled and rotting in your cave
The black wastes of the evening sky
Desolate oceans, and the light of lonely plains
What in our lives is burnt in the fire of this?
A burnt space through ripe fields