Science has begun to entangle us
A fever dream of Josef Mengele's
Bloods and Crips
Brooding with clips
While drones encircle Los Angeles

Napoelon II

assassinated
his carriage was ugly
lynched
without reason his murder
the face disguised
the food on the lap of his sister
exhibited
etiquette maintained in bad puns
the Emperor alone
a corpulent dead man

Napoleon I

the failure of the King
the hands to sign
I need much space to die in
unable to
the reward of pistols
that poison
lost potency
able to contemplate
suicide again
until the arrival of
Anger and deadly anxiety
that sanctuary of decision
mother's constant care
the marriage of death
and deepest love

Prime

That which lies behind
The seamless air
Stirs both the mind
And the air

The flowing brine
The shiftless pine
Stir the mind
And are stirred themselves

The bell
Keening in the tower
It tells the hour
In one place only

The blast of frost
In the hoary air
The spell of loss
Arriving there
It lifts your hair

Why trace its source?
Let it crest
Let it course

The initial trill
Of the toll
Let it roll
As it will

Watch the wave
Triple on the shore
Unbolt the quavering
Roseate door

The magic
Of your imagining
Spins the reel

The world spins
Wherever you steal

Still you grouse
Still you brood
Over water, over food

Until you think on
The motion when you move
That which stirs the blood
And moves the moving of
The bodies above

Aliment

You do what you can.

The heart does what it will.

I content myself with doggerel.

I Sing of Myself in the Second Person

You seldom are the meadowlark, quivering in the cool,
Gleaning under oak shade in great tumults of grass;
Rather like a spry osprey at a pond, dimmed at dusk,
Watching minnow flit with a gimlet eye,
Waiting to descry the ouroboros.

Twelve or Thirteen

The dilated years you sidled through
When you climbed the farthest, rarest trees,
When you fell from night to morning dew,
When no one stopped to look for you,
While many looked the other way,
The longest tree, now manic, grew,
Eclipsed the sun and poetry.

The power of your instincts,
Catholic, made all worship true;
The intellect of your senses
The immenseness of your ways-
Climbing down a ladder of trees
That from your body, supple, grew
You spied a swarm of knees
Bending, poised...

Dinner Plate

Flies defect from droning flight
To poise in menace clouds
Over bodies wheedled where
The promise of a glory share
Turned banner into shroud.

They perch upon pointed steel-
Sleek, silver, slaked-
Silhouetted against the sun, huddled
On smokey dolmens, scarlet-puddled.
And women left for dead, naked.

There are breathless physicians
With blighted hands dispensing care
A horse wheezes, groans, loudly wails.
Foul odours gleam a golden trail
Through the ashen air.

The world is whorling, turning open;
The worms interred are now intruding,
Wriggling in the dusk. The day
Is closing. A rotten array,
A banquet of bone and string.

From misty veil to grimy gut
The valorous borne into the earth,
Swallowed - like Badroulbadour
Concatenating their thankless gore
And making  mockery of birth.

The centipede borne on the flag
And stamped upon the public coin
Has coiled round the lancer's point
And plunged into the beggar's rag,
Annealed the silvered pyramid.

An old politician said:
"Let blood be stone, let ringed hand
Swiftly lay the bricks of the dead,
A new temple for the old godhead.
Let painted spears form a wreath
Of boys in wine-colored costume,
Ennobling all remaining breath.
Let honey gild the rim of death,
Let painters limn the unlimned gloom,
And the gore of men again anoint
The spoils of their father's tombs."

With sterling sword and magic root
The sons of sons and their employ
Go making sons and minting coin.

Time and Its Length

When at last I join the summing
I will not be folded like a flag
I will be sluiced in the mouth
Of an inscrutable deity
My exploits unchronicled by ink
My effects unpreserved in quiet tombs
My heart, still bleeding, will not be
Immolated in ceremony
Nor will my effigy be carried
Through the cold climes of poverty
To serve as a warning
Against disloyalty.

I hope a wind takes my remains
And doesn't set them down

All these vain cells
These profitless sinews
Have helixes reaching back in time
Germs aching to be borne
On Zeus' thigh, in Clio's horn
To rejoice in becoming

Desire

All those thrown in prison,
Unpublished poets all,
Alienated in this prism
Of wasted words and gall.
You've met those restless souls,
Enclosed by hueless barbs,
Digging holes and filling holes,
Drawing for the card.
You too have waited like them,
Grown bitter and hard,
Clung to the rim,
Counted the stars... 

You should be poised in a rapture
Like a child held by its mother
And holding the aperture
Eternally aflutter.
You fell from a puncture,
Touched your lips to the grail,
But clambered back to suture
The ambrosial veil.