Mirrors Around X

After Max Ritvo

Max’s body is made up of four parts,
equidistant from each other

as if wounds could set up a band
to rehearse evocative ballads.

The towel covering his body is an ancient
relic that once dried the blood

a mind releases when scrapped against
the wall nothingness built for itself.

That there is something withdrawing,
imagine dawn sensitive to the light of our sun

makes us observe him as a thing of the past,
a poet that understood how silence* – look

how he loved to stare into the ceiling,
ready to analyze how time*

*erases itself in circles.

While his weight, being a relative thing
also, lost its arm while wresting the bed,

we see this body rotate its darkness
until pain becomes a word beetles

bite before they mate;

the sum of chaos
can be no significant addition
to the monotony of entropy

they say but then why do we crowd
around a youth bearing so many vowels of blood?

He still has the strength to answer:

because destruction has a soul who walks
leaving poems as clues along the way.

__

Altocumulus

Language crafted
a body for me
made of constant
but ultimately ephemeral clouds

a community of sky passengers
that coalesce to give me a sense

of myself
when they hold hands.

Then I am there.

It may seem like I hurt
myself as I play
with the teeth of the world

you could argue
I’m being gorged by an appetite
of monstrous qualities.

But if I open my eyes
wide enough, I’m back
to my vaporous nature

rising as steam
from the bowl of the cosmos.

It is a child that governs the universe.

For a moment
it seems she will speak
some adorable adjective

but no language emerges
just a puff of air
to blow the steam away.

I exchange my body for a breeze
– is that death, to travel

alone across the memory of the sky.

__

Deep time

Three poems
per millennium.

Rice migrating
through twilight
toward the mouth.

Memories crystalline
in a pond
of pure abstraction.

The hunter
burning
the news from
Mars.

Darkness
kept in the vein
of laughter.

The breast
as a planet
feeding the thirst
for revolution.

One syllable
of angst
per anniversary.

Next morning
unfolding the claims
of perception.

__