Last chances of smoke
Curling with the blowing wind
And taking our other selves
As a sieve or a filter
Or an air brush touching up
What is coming down.

Down to greet us and meet us
From deep inside us, inherent,
Formed of clay
As they say of the ancestors
At the origin of the world
Now dim and fabled.

Now orgiastic and summiting
With very breath of each other,
The breadth of experience
As the ocean is deep,
So the mind built as origami is folded,
Looking inward, looking down the canyon walls
To read itself in time.

We are just in time,
Surrounded by mummies, Faerie Queens,
Exotica or erotica and totem of the fetish,

Flashing feather like a bird turning,
As the Phoenix on fire
Arising from the hot bed,
Still half asleep,
Still envisioning a new beginning,
Leaning in with all our might,
All our enthusiasm swallowed whole.

Like a crocodile with a fish,
We go gulping after sunlight and
The care taker government
Has issued egos for everyone to wear
In any time of night time crisis.
We could scream.

Someone on the other team asks
The first next question of us:
Who is semaphore for the much more?
Who can hear the ear
Or scrape knees on the bottom
As we hold our breath.

As we hold each other,
Noses above the surface
But deep beneath the covers
Our bodies sleep,
Rubbing the cubs of our legs,
The placid lake shuddering with first drops of rain.
First ones sunk with the mud and silt that came
As run off from the hills,
From the dark soil and seeds
After the basalt has spread and cooled,
Crumbled to fertile soil.

It’s the going rate,
By ten and by twenty fathoms to the hour,
Or by the board feet,
Cut to chinks and ledges, brook levers
And splinters in the skin,
Red with infection, irritation
And the labors of helping professions
Charging more to be ahead and
To hear more about the laity
And the festival schedule.

We need not pay every day.
We need not waste the garden party
Of horderves and boiled eggs and hairy legs
Like storks and bellies and the rubbing fire,
The runaway reward,
The postulate taken to unenviable limits.
No one wants to belong to a fascist organization
Bent on lies for all involved but some rigid
Number of people pander to make it so.
Make it war and waste the best wealth on the worst,
Serving up demands for the march of more.

The vagaries of the many are the saucy, spicy
Delicious dishes of us.
Temptations of beauty who no longer leverage sin,
Never thought twice, like dogs at a carcass,
Bur for their rank in the pack and
Can I submit my will or be driven,
Driven on by the stubborn element of others.

The mealy eyes of contingent prizes
Signifying more than their worth in meat or merit.
So spills the red blood of us
That in time past had its home in the claw of nature
Purported to flood periodically with passion.

This juicy loin of the tyrants overthrow is the mountain moving,
The ego relenting,
The landslide of the build up suddenly transforming the land
To a brutal stone, scalding soup of liquid and momentum and
It raises new berms, carves a course to leveler plains and
Settles like a century where quickly move in
The settlers, the conquerors and the rest, me.

I am not a psychic volcano.
Upheaval is not my way.
Dross, compromise, getting dressed, getting ready,
That seems to be more how it goes.
Tell me how it feels to be a water drop.
I was whispering in the wind.
I ate my supper.
We coincide with tragedy sometimes.

We know not what we are.
Hard scrabble bickering over poverty and work and
Must do situations that come unhinged, dangle
Like all the broken things.
The self is broken, hanging,
Calling out for usurpers to flee.

Out on the old Avenue, robbed,
Accosted, confronted by what we are,
Warmed over, left for rest.
“Don’t talk to me” she says.
Some of us doubt.
Some don’t like looking inward
Or at reflections of the dark
Appearing through the glass.

The ambivalent sand sifts time and
Settles on another world,
Like Mars, red, cold, rusting and at war.
The costs add up.
The debutantes come out for pictures,
Strolling with dates of times to come.
The memory is insufficient,
Baked in like the cheese of a soufflé
The Chinoiserie of the 18th century,
The Tate Modern restored to its ruins,

Not a story of culture.
Don’t talk.
Cease your thinking.
Thought is over rated and even your silence is annoying.
Block full of grease.
Whale head full of spermaceti oil, clean, golden,
Rich as fire crackling up through the woods,
Through the dazzling brightness of our approach.
We are here to do it all again.

Some sandy, sunny shore,
Flies buzzing around the blubber of the carcass.
You have had your time,
Illicit, manly but skunk like
In the night glare and shadow.
Punk like in sticking to the licentious crowd,
Wanting more, pressing the stage,
Becoming one unto herself.

There is no one of all self,
No mechanism of such consciousness
Swollen so obscene, gargantuan,
Unheard of by terrible fantasy made man.

Illiberal, unbecoming wrester between the shadow self
And the berries of the night shade family.
The corpuscles of her moon glowing slightly
Knowing more beneath and before the scans
Than we knew when we were just dating –
Getting to know each other as they say
Like a blasphemy.
Do we need to spell it out: S. I .N.

Sin of single atom,
Alone as all the needy electrons, neutrons, protons, clinging.
We need other to be still so that we can hear,
That we can see,
That we are not wrong again
Holding hope that one transfixed is by the mirror crossed,
By shames abandoned, humming,
Knowing the shortest of line and point.

Another line, another point and so,
The momentum of not self picks up some satisfaction,
Some bruising and latency, some extent of existing
And her memory, the fountain of the occult running
On the floor, making us more
Just at the brink of despair
At the end of her hair.

On fire with 20 points at the half,
A gallon of crude oil,
The night glow of horizon forest fires.
Enough said.
Stop talking.

Patient nuance, famous fighter,
Glad to have a hand, a part in the number
And the crowd goes wild.
The stick in my eye, ringing in my ears,
The fat calves and sumptuous remains
Barely held for the adoration
Of the dead poet’s cult.

He called it of course, loud and raw and
Laid up afterwards as so much chord wood at the crematoria,
Creekside – the river stretching below –
Both banks swollen by upstream rain.
You find her in the baths tending her skin,
Reeling in the too eager to be told
With the regalia of their humility, death and bones.
The teeth of her necklace mark the high water points of
The poets from a Golden Age, an empire before time when
The gods walked among us.
Broken shoot, shaft of green,
Tonsil rumbling with the next incantation,
The tales of love in a thousand and one nights.

What is the difference between a truth talker and soothe sayer.
Peg up the motive of the political class,
The champions of the working people
Finally going to bed.
Going to take it all away,
As in all times
Where the corpse is left on the top of a platform
For the birds and raptors to take it to the other world,
As the Egyptians know the Nile,
So the Indians the ghats of Varanasi,
Quetzalcoatl and the ruined feathered serpent
Of the heart of the morning star still bleeding.

The Russian dog, the Innuit fox, coyote, drum beat and
The tera cotta of the ice age sloths and the bronze age battering rams,
Their babies’ utensils covered like a comb in gold.
The crowd astute to some unsettling mesmerizer,
Some terror thrown from the internal to the internal,
The almond souls of knowing oils
Smeared to mark the spot on the rock,
On the forehead where out can be in,
One can be for all.

And the crowd scents the masterpiece,
Again calling inside each individual like a heretic,
A demon, a demonstration of shoes marching,
Be it work or war, the people know at a glance,
Each other motionless inside and a fury of dawn fire –
Creative destruction – they lie and lie and lie.

We settle our backs to the bottom of the casket
Like a grave, the nub where we lay,
Cultivating each other like lovers
Beyond the smothering mouths,
The slogan sledding mantra of too much, too soon, too many.
We know otherwise.

We sense a difference in her alphabet – able to unravel encryptions.
Speak in a soft voice, a bloom of berries, the babies,
The water future where worlds like Mars
Have their time to turn like earth in an emptiness
Beyond telling, the “Lord of the meeting rivers”.
The names in endless progression calling us out,
Dumbing us down,
To be not so clever with our assertions but
Humble beyond passage or invitation,
Beyond me or you or
A crowd of souls in a bowl,
Picked like stars from a sky far distant, quiet,
Finding us unsettled,
Out of place,
Resistless as an orphaned moon.

By Rolf Stavig
8/30/2023