Let’s string the syllables freely, intangibly,

silently, for a perpetually stoned monarch

of moribund and infinitely beautiful, infinite

hopelessness; wonderless and sated, in a sated land,

under a forever starred sky…

I deplore the intricacy of the stars.

My tears efface them from the tablet of night . . .

I pray for the air to be love.

And then, to my gladness,

sultry women,

goddesses and cold beauties,

comfort my emergency,

suffuse me with their pity,

with a mother’s priceless sigh.

Wash the glass casing of my heart

with the love of words, and bleed dark,

purple wine over my child body.

Then I resurrect, still-souled and titillated

by the universe’s enigmas.

I am emboldened for cosmic thrill;

inebriated, a reality captivates me with

its abstract, violet-colored scent.

I become one of the wall-eyed, lost men who

eternally search for their way in the city’s maze.

Cocaine thieves beyond either fear or hope.

Free to rove and live illegally,

denizens of a realm once or twice

removed from the ordinary world where

consequences of actions mean you are

frail, systematized by gravity.

I do not last long in the maze . . .

It spits me out and I return, alas, to regular life.

I am programmed differently than

I had anticipated.

I am tied up with the Dream and

I am hungry to record a lazy god’s

footprints

forever.

But I am also bursting at the seams of

my subtle body. I want to ride

with the wall-eyed men.

A raw child, I want poetry’s

direct action

I want to fall lawless into the night, where the city

intersects with the underworld —

adumbration of heaven.

I will not have so many

experiences such as these

in this life . . .

But all shall be reconciled and forgotten if

I can dine with Rimbaud in paradise

in the end . . .

Lift the brimming cup to my lips . . .

And receive the immortal gift . . .

No more words will have to spill.

All music and letters will flow

redundantly from here forward . . .

because I will have attained

the empyrean

of realities . . .