kyrie eleison

i am peering into the hole
again, and
i am stirring my finger in the
tea-fragranced depths

there is a lake, a
reservoir laid out inside
the body terrain

blue demanding of darkness,
midnight indigo and the
color of gasping blood

the inside a cavern that echoes
and bruises the night, the
inside a wreath of songbirds

a gallery of knives, lift a
sail or two against the winds
watch the nighttime carry
stars in the zephyr

such a vacancy of soul, there
dwells a spirit but yet none--
both holy and deserted

i love yet do not know of its warmth
i feel yet am numb as a sainted corpse

shivering a fever in the forehead
excavation of a fathomless yield
the heart is empty even as it is full,
impossible tides beneath questionable moons

i am both a birthplace and a grave,
marked with dawn and decay, i am
perhaps in motion but in a
backwards blooming--shy bud
opening and closing and withering and
bursting all at once in doomed synchronicity
consumed by paradox, anomaly aching, a
wounded enigma perched in a day-old bouquet

laurel, i wear with beauty and tears
laurier, je porte avec la beauté et les larmes

You were digging holes into
the sky big enough to slip through
while I lay here in an excavated grave
When you fall up and into the air
does the blood still rush to your ears?
What is the impact when you cannot
dissolve into the ground?
Does your blood thin in the atmosphere?
Do your bones crush against the clouds?
When you fall upwards, do your knees
scrape against the sun?
The pale blue of an earthen halo
into which we fell
fighting the physics of
its reign

they don't understand living, the
lot of them, they don't understand
the wound of death. and their
pews are full but their hearts are
uninhabited places. they too are
distant from their own flesh, but
maybe not in way of wound. A strange
damage, peculiar impressions on the skin
that look like a crucifix

where does the fury flee when it
is no longer welcomed in the bones?
to far countrys or highlands, but
even there the hills are scorched and swollen

i am existing unearthed, like i hover
two feet behind the body, like
maybe a coffin follows vertically a
small distance behind the spine

i am feeling a bruise floating, as if
buoyed by breath, or perhaps
sunken and sinking the way of
anchors, shackling at the ankles

perhaps anguish is a journey self made,
perhaps grief is labyrinth to living,
both a forest into which i vanish
tangled, somehow torrid in their shade

Pus in the pupils, it is
here the soul leaves, like
sight is a wound that
goes unbearing, cannot
keep bearing--belligerent

Blood that pricks up in a
nauseous rage, blood that
spills unrested in the veins

Inside the body death is
deadness and the sound of
old ropes twisting, trinity
of blame, blistering cross

God as a widower, God as
crutch, God as dead man
inside the tomb of the chest