Nothing Else Pertains

1. A pool of sorrow washes over my feet. I walk on waves to avoid its depths. There, I shall float to a cove of freedom. It demands my all. It crawls across my face like a marauding mosquito. My blood flows through the insidious syringe, feeds the world’s worst sinners: parasites of the living, slurping corpuscles like wine. 2. The poem rises from nothingness into Being, miracle of creation bestowed on paltry yearnings. Faithful steed through the long, laborious night, the horse rears against its rider. No one listens to my lyric save the corpulent corpse awaiting resurrection. I drink the dregs of wisdom as they spill my way. Do they cohere? Does the wolf stalk the deer through mystic forests? Meaning no longer elicits memory or will. Let it flow through my mortal center, the still, small voice of art. Watercolors fade at the fringe of patterned paper. Oil mixes with water, their hues repeal the blanched face of death. 3. Let us laugh at our weakness, painting gray and wan the grand overture to tragedy. Fortunes fall and rise to tides of the banal. This, the world without God, swirling with delusions of sovereignty, with the impotence of choice. Ride to the city gates. Let enemies fire cannons, strike the bells, burn books of verse, enslave the soul of the poet, who navigates homeward through a tyrannical dark wood. 4. Where Paradise begins, Inferno ends. We climb the slippery slope of Purgatory, striving to rise, rise, rise past the clutches of sin. Once we arrive, we are lost in the psychedelia of the beatific vision. Behold, behold. Joy twists eternity into a lock with key. Turn it tightly, hear tumblers click, feel resistance, never force. The gate gapes at an embarrassment of riches: la dolce vita. Eye gold dust sloshing in the pan’s crevices. Eye the sold sign on Teresa’s interior castle. We are not made for death, even as the maker’s mark fades in the sun, sinks into the cove. Let us wash it clean of error and lust. Here, nothing else pertains.