Diabetic Ketoacidosis and Camus 

There is no flight from light, no  
solution to the absurd, when  
through the ghost we are revived— 
the shiny little sun-stars seeing out 
like a pomegranate comprised of  
eyeballs. We belong to time, ever now, 
and this here has buried you like a moist bone. 

“You’re in DKA. If you live like this, you’ll die  
by 30, organs failing.” How you cried while  
they tried to IV your jugular, refusing the Ativan,  
kicking off the gown, while I wrung my hands  
over the track marks hidden on my calves;  
I watched and wished addiction would  
finally rocket me into theurgy— 

but not to God as his quaternary, as  
the destroyer and death. It’s all  
reduced to poetry, this relapsing  
that amounts to confessing that, as a child,  
catching toads in the window wells, you  
were only to stay a stranger to yourself—lost  
in psychoses, wails of sirens and sex.  

If suicide could be a solution to the absurd, if  
the boulder didn’t turn, and we didn’t have to  
heave our consciousnesses back down the hill…  
Frankl’s Auschwitz bottom-pot soup pea would  
have no rebellion, liberty, or laughter in it. No, no  
man has ever come back to speak of sweet, lucky  
death; he finds means to bark light till the rock’s a  
stele, and runs out like a thief full-pocketed. 

 Metempsychosis

The morning’s wrapped in crumpled rags 
Lazarus unmasked: flitting bats and cockroaches 

      /water plashing, tower collapsing 

The moon’s a cistern on a ship: a yacht  
Prow splitting chopped, green sea 

      /light pollution veiling even titans 

Seven on the candelabra stand: Cerealia 
Peeled orange rinds 

     /Saturn’s emesis 

Broken, the seals: Bacchus/Dionysus  
(Krishna, Christ, and Buddha dangle on a Tau Cross) 

    /bright and morning pentalpha  

The Aeneid or The Iliad: 
Swarms of garbage piling in the ocean  

    /the nymphs are departed. the nymphs (@ Auschwitz) 

The evening sunk red and weltering: 
An acrid rain was falling poco a poco 

    /a calendar on her smartphone 

Virtue is no prostitute 
Mouths of maggots we eat for farthings 

    /Ipsissimus:  

Strung 

what is this insipid cottonmouth  
tongue clacking off of the palate 
stuck 
stuck to the skin and the teeth I teeming teethe 
the undulating hiccups of heart 
a crust 
a soot ashtray  
I light cigarette after cigarette  
for if the poet is to feel, then I am its laureate  

these boulders we heave out of the lockstep mundane 
unhooking your pants button like the scythe of time pruned a rose 
to unglue me with your gaze  
and leave me in a fit of laughter, for your eyes are stars 
and long I'm undone like the tripping shoe 
by your lace-skin 

if I could tuck in time 
I would say goodnight 
and be near you forever 
not tomorrow, not yesterday,  
but now, now,  
now 

but somehow the moon, yes, is water  
so why not a waterfall? 

when I string up your movements like fish through the gills  
or corded lights of Christmas  
dusk is desperate for the stars to come out 
and Venus is as reddened as Mars. 

Rock Bottom 

Oh, to be honest I have clearly 
felt the soft noon. It disappeared  

into a 4 o’clock dusk. Shadows on 
the rib racks; I squeezed out the  

spiracle. Ate myself alive again at 
the nadir. 

                   There on my back, lying 
on cardboard, awed under the vast- 

ness of the starless Cincinnati sky, 
ear to ear I smiled, rolling and rock 

-ing, “I have no rock bottom! I have 
no rock bottom!” Fentanyl fiends  

shooting me dead in the alleyways. 
“Who’s the President?” the inquiry 

of EMTs. “Is it Donald Trump?” Well, 
who is the President? And, who, who 

will check for fruit on the sagging  
branch that bursts fat with sap? Nec- 

tar of the poets mad with mysticism? 
The deer looked with fawn, and a white 

river empties the gully. So we be rid. So 
we expel. But nothing does such; it just.  

In What Goblinry Walt’s Ghost Spectre’d Before Me 

In what goblinry Walt’s ghost spectre’d before me, “Poet, your beard points. Go!” 
With quickened breath I scampered the steep, elbowed, horseshoe-turned steps and out,  
          out into the deserted empty street. 

The moon slipped behind wisps with the whole sky lamped as if lightning were flashing.  
Only cars whisked past, stereo systems like 
          sonic booms droned, driving toward more television, 
          dwindling like stones skipped, and womp-womping sirens ignited through the night-ether. 

Bars beckoned me Bukowski as I intersectioned the small-town main street, 
          neon-alive, 
          as a man on a motorized bicycle slow-motion zipped past 
          whinnying an angry cicada,  
          as if Gary Snyder were elucidating the all-at-once big-bang-boom of the ineffable Tao  
          by unrolling a toilet paper roll like a let-out kite string through the window sans speech. 

Dharma un-bummed! 
O how shitless! How unstained! 
In the sloughs of the lost, senescent twilight, under the street-lamped pools, 
          hues explode starker 
          where life is ever more vibrant for death. 

Then, upon returning to my room, 
          how frightened I was 
          when Leaves of Grass fell off the shelf, 
          piercing the lid of my cardboard box of to-be-read books.  

O to walk outside into the mystic, delirious 
         like an indoor cat set outside with a monocle eye, 
         with poets in the mind-ear, like a schizoid answering their self in shouts at the bus stop, 
         smearing the fecal out of the back of the pants onto the half-shattered plexiglass 
         and shouting,  
         “Look Mr. President! I too poo Picasso! Piccadilly putrid, poco forte, pianissimo— 
          perchance you have seen it, the Louvre!”