Echolocation
In sleep I sulk to Sitka to survey
its Sea-born winds— Orca spirits startle
stratovolcano sirens
from their felsic hypnosis a hazard-
gloomed high— Salmon fishermen stroll harbor-
land terminals during their Sea-
sabbaticals suspended spear-instincts
sinister as a Sea-death: natural
nautical sight their shadowed Sea-gift
sure as my exiled forefathers’ certain
confidence in strength of mutant moontide-
contrition— Deepwater Tashlich: our breath
and our burden. Below the port a fjord
glacier flows; its fossilized foundation
slackens against a future oath of folk-fire,
expels wind-eating specters dispatched by
Sea-souls awake epochs before my lurch
toward dream-brinks and Sea-terminals— Synclinal wind-
combustion— Sea-stalled fossil-whale spirits
forget my foreign origin submerged
shame to beckon my breath: a sulking slumbered witness—
Sin-eater
Graveyard fixation; my interior scourge— Cattle-
sunned wood-paneled lungs cycle our canyon
cadenza constant and certain so I
forget cruelty is its origin—
Our constitutional Kaddish a
humid repetition rite: burial
in synclinal bobcat Earth binds our bone
to its regular requiem of rage,
our founding fable’s reverberation
sharp and sick as a knell— If I allow
myself to breathe without thought I recall
that old processional hymn— Elixir
of rehearsed contrition; my firstborn charge—
Alchemy of caged contamination:
coagulating self-crucifixion—
Swallowed sin-cullet molts to my sternum.
Ossified zero-sum shame; in a desert
of my wielding interior bone-shards
erode silt past the riverbed into its core,
its meandering grain: ingredients
to break a breathing thing soaked in the scum.
Mimesis
Like ritual akin to hyperpnea a synaptic shortcut,
liturgical anxiolytic
Oseh shalom bimromav—
I displace my ten-year interior foreign fuse
often as neurons rise
to meet the oscillating Earth.
During the peak of the Perseid meteor shower
I postponed foretold despair
via immersion in Lana Del Rey’s music videos
composed during her transitory suffering through
dawning fame:
Riveted by her exquisite surreal
corpse suspended in her ride or die’s outstretched arms
blazed in fermented grief— their totaled Ford Mustang an aflamed backdrop,
inscribed furied joint-annihilation—
Or her on that druggy Dockweiler Beach
spinning in ellipses swaying
to his and her youth mind reel
looping— in another’s convertible
her nighttime urge to self-immolate
swayed by that hibernal hand
on her neck. At the origin fixed
garden of brilliance she betrayed
herself apple-tooth breathless kiss
Knowing and chosen apocalypse—
She and I know with lover’s proximity
the nighttime drive to paralyze breath
subdue its extravagant menace
into a highway hypnosis habitual high
and the narcotic nerve-ablation of near suicide,
a capitulation anesthetic—
She became famous at twenty-six age of dawned
synclinal guilt
sirens in her left iris roadkill in mine
Yimakh shemo
I met the arid Earth— Consumed vault-
amygdala stress-logarithm sanctioned me
to seek prescience in Brittlebush— A left-
socket seer prescribed shame-saccharine Sea-
clown slacklining; A virgin slot-canyon
sandstone-crux charts its sediment as shock
apparitions sleaze-steer a stagnant Sea:
Circus-sin conscription,
Procedural sodomy:
Hypnotic suicide
covenant guzzled by all
but the crux-child invited
into the magician’s
dream-path pulverizer:
brake run-boycotted helix—
I am motion-sick with
a divination-death glimpse
of a carnival Earth:
I hide elephant carcasses behind
the funhouse gallows;
A wire-noose swing scavenges the ball pit—
My geek show, that rape:
Right hand-rot
grips my wrists around
the circus tent pole; left hand-knife
severs my body from its bearings.
I stare at a metal-beam roof. Blink-fissures
thrust-erupt our inherited illness: Shechem’s bane?
You are bound to my bone
as I am bound to your breath:
I am the seer. You, my
fountainhead-pathology—
Congruent Antecedent
Mary Lee I know you hid your bite— A
mislaid pulse stole God’s merit-aperture
to rid you of your soul’s breath:
that nerve-bound fear-flight of our forefathers—
Forensic Babel-blueprint our desert-
damnation: an amber vision
within a rock’s throw to Jerusalem.
Charles when God choked you with Sea-scarred salt
did you taste a weather-withered fig
Atlantic-sour as your conscience template
that mariner’s Kotel? Seed scattered in
saltwater: shock-sensation projection
our spark-surfaced schematic satellite—
Solomon’s split child our sailor’s Sabbath—
Sin-sick separation; lineage-cleaved breath
of suspended grief gnawing sedation
of adjourned apparitions wind-borne woe
that sedimentary heuristic: nautical
sight to sense the possibility of
sunrise God’s breath a sinner’s Sabbath-soul—
Your gunner’s mate march against a Saguaro mirage—
