how it must have sheared the seams, entered
the scabbard of this sorrel skin, welting, wickering

where the gnash whipped and lashed. where the wound
ledgered into the tenor of my isomorph, a cardinal

garden inflorescence, my hurt was harvested for you
am martial, the émigré mercenary. a weather beaten

samurai. each bone diluvian, indentations of decades
turning my marrow to mote. i was the dust of space.

then you. the sudden ballad of ioras misting a sunrise
then you, the ebb of eventide, of coasts receding to kihon

how my body queried to the stance of katas responds
to your jejune birdcalls. how my black blood roses turn

to the lit faces of dhalias. how the valleys of ha and hamachi
concur with the lines of fate shut tight against my locked fist

how the warrior is won. how the oracle is undone.
where we return hagakure to its cipher where we have learned
enough to unlearn

where it all ended and how it all begun.

I resumed iaido training. In my hermit mode, my ode to the sword.

At the symposium, we were discussing somnipathy. I remembered a particular case from the heydays where the boy felt he would die in his dreams and yet, he felt that was a better space than the lived world.

he is used to a sleep
darkening which is scribbled
agate on the turbulent
black board with air
castles playing hangman

he is used to blood
callings, cobwebs – a remote
curtain stuttering erasure
over the years that have built
their steeled institutions

within the deepest recesses
he is snaking his sorrowing
when breath turns tinder
and he is tangled in the unformed
angles of his own body; cusped

he carries his grave everywhere
he is profuse in his doctrine of departures
that life is a direction not a place
in his sleep, he finds himself an arrow
aimed for his homeless heart

Desire, as a question, is formed in language. It is born in language, it dies in language.

I have known the hows
of whys and the sighs of nows
breathe with the same stamina
as moths unfurled over flames.
I have heard life quell implicit
inch by inch like a dazzle of eels
I have drawn every loss like my own
diagram of an objet’d’art
swimming in the undertows

There is no distance in time. The wine
of waves is blessed, brutal: divine
salt docked, earth clocked in the
wharfs of your throat, voice is a bateau
whirling weak-kneed desire is born
from questions the remains of tongues
always in rigor mortis, fished a chassis
this vocabulary of the ocean inherits
everything into its nadir, a chronic design

So take this night from black to blue
a shade of ache from the invisible hue
the quest in question limned to my
fernweh, my beautiful destiny of
riverbeds and sea turfs, I have acquired
the skin, the sheen, the desert daylight
an intimacy of experience, I am satyred
to collect the bodies I exited through

But after nightfall. Only you.

These words evacuated from a disaster. Their own
blue ruin, the environment becomes an elegy.
When you sit here each thumbed page an epitaph
each raised brow a gravestone, I wonder what
words am I going to bury in the necessary
calamity of this season. Between you and me

there are frequently uprooted railroad tracks.
Our words rattle as bridges threatening to collapse
under the weight of this traffic of desire. In transit
these words hide in the resilient architecture of our
hearts. each occupied precipice, pillar and parapet
unaware that whirlwinds exist solely to reveal. ravel.

But sometimes, just sometimes, your mouth appears
as a rescue craft and it hovers over mine till
all my words are saved, one lost breath at a time

everything a cuisine.

consider

the abalone unshelled of
its aureate nacre, the arc
of its grip crisped in mango
pulp muscled raw and tart. a taste
expensive, an education. the sea
summoned to mouth. redeem. also

imagine

how the texture of raisins and
mushrooms leave your tongue
moonstruck, like shorelines
reinventing their demeanors
to acquaint borders with migrants

or how salad green with intent
cauterizes the denuded
char of meat. tells you how
much ever you burn something
will nudge in, its leafy lull stuttering

observe

the opal grin of onions from under
a sheath of water held for heating
steam beating against the glass ceiling
of its contained enclosure. if you must
disintegrate in your circumstance
be ecstatic. bejewelled. dance unsteady.

consider, again

the neat bowties of farfalle or even the
fine mollusc frame of conchiglie. here
we are back to the symmetry of ocean
dwellers and their bodies replicated
in the earth of flour. wheat stripped
to shape dressed in amber mist of olive
oil and cheese. salud!
each love readies you for the next.

remember

the semiotics of seeds and sprouts
the legerdemain of loaves
the graphology of grains
the finite of fishbelly white

so stave the full
filling. bid me hunger.
always.

the stirring sonata of your shoulders
coves of cadence awaiting to be implored

here the subtle notturno of your nose a redolent
solo soaring of the crescent muse

beneath a mouth the petite suite of a mazurka
troves unbidden, each note an atlas inclined

that which brings me to the fugue of fingers
pliant as eager keys on the cusp of a caress

the ricercar of wrists, veins calligraphed
inlets, the searching upsurge of strength

your heart a hymn, each beat psalmed
to whatever Music that gave you form

R.I.P

hello crux // incumbent, clumsy, chiral // all mirrors margined to the left where // peregrine awaits encounter

hello half spun // sine qua non singularity // swording through in multitudes // unhinge all revolutions

hello necessary decay // -ed flavor of the future past // where aftertaste arrives // before consumption

hello ammo acoustic // rigor quantic calculating // waves cresting through the length of time // and everything begins to undefine

“Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.” [ adam philips ]

your sine has been argued
my psyche graphed
to the differential of moods
the act of denting
scratches onto the unsmooth
Braille of logic

depression. ad interim
curved bell of the body
raving a seedlet, coffined
against the cool marble
of a bitter gravestone

mania. in praise of everything
that is erose and on a slant
aurora as light baptized in acid
ravelled the striations of grief
aquitas – a prismed polarity

worship the incongruence
of insanity resign from
the compulsory symmetry
of wholeness. broken into
fractals the mind scales
back to its desired geometry

* DSM classification code for bipolar disorder owing to mood fluctuations. [ borderline psychotic]