Turning of the Wheel: A Poetry Cycle.

Turning of the Wheel

I. Rosewood in the Temple of Disbelief.

petals like angels, blushing brides

cast out and down

a rain with skin of feathers

bricked cobblestone streets

grey and brown, littered with

crushed red lips

the curtain passes.

The murmuring crowds, the chest of drawers

the masque of mundanity

cast aside.

Perfect memory, teacup falling,

shattered cornflower on linoleum soul,

each line a curve, each movement planned.

II. Could.

Tower of knives, fork of Truth

pierces, prods, lifts

raising into the maw of Infinity

raw essence of sustenance,

tranquility in satiety.

Complacency bridges nothing,

dimorphism twists the turning door;

fatality breeds out purity,

rendering each a mirror crack'd

rending soul and limb, truck and root.

Words fumbled, life mumbled

shuffled feet on broken stones,

pouring through crevices,

static drowns the passing time

stasis is the drowning man.

III. Dimorphology.

truth in silence

roots shooting upwards

steel beams burned bark

pinprick fireflies

motes of ancient light

morbid wing beats the dais

wheel grinding a mouth

gear stripped bear

gasping sun

holding

cornered stone

pack

Pi.

IV. Trying Times.

teasing waves

auburn hair

terse, rigid

grasping hand

round the root

siphoning earth

shifting

down

below

the rose bush.

turning thyme

on its end, juniper

berries mashed to pulp

all for

saving grace, to

dig, twist, wound

to find the lost

so precious to have

display it, peacock

bury it, hidden

naught much to do

but weep.

unearth the treasure

turn asunder

ripped warm from

tortured forms blighted

by sun-blotted man

rather to pass unnoticed

as a lie too often told.

boasting becomes not you

or it, and yet this fit you

make this plea fragile

grasping that trinket

call the cyclone

flee the dog.

torn asunder, rendered whole,

digging produced naught

but that which was

sought and worn,

gleaming, for the sake of pride,

too enamored to cast it

out, fearful of

chains.

to the bush you go, with a secret

to the earth you go, with a pain

bury it, you say, bury i

and let it be done.

Beneath

thorn and petal

beneath

the weight of years

bury it and let it

go.

harder now the earth is

older shifting downwards

somnium non somnium

close to the surface

cannot pry deeper

placed, covered,

smothered in shame

fled and moved forward

and let it fester

erote let it work

through the soul

over a spillage

of years.

dangled, it did, on the thorn.

circled, it did, the petal.

gleaming.

V. Proper Burial.

Tortured abundance, awed

in the presence of absence,

locked behind a molten door,

flame and fluid bound together,

all is well, save the weather.

sprouting, planting, threashing floor

pains of labor, ferocious

birth muted, baubles cascading

'round the trellis, cats' eyes

down the stairs.

wing of darkness, eye of light

stone temple lost in the winding

(of clocks and spades, racks and maids)

of time, chance, tortured lives,

wrapped in the favrice of circumstance,

covered in a shroud of causality;

It images matrilineal devotion.

It claimes no progenitor.

the jelly fires, and liquid thought

ceases, folding back upon itself.

the worm upon

its tail,

angles broken now distend,

neither explosive force nor pitiless sighs.

dormant deity upon

a table of roses betwixt the thorns

bespeckled with jewels of root and earth,

cold comfort wrung from memories passing

whence risen, hence deceased.