If Only in Words

Where to go when the words hold no refuge?

What will be sent to take their place?

Dedicated to the transient forms

that shape the time elapsing.

The ink runs to get ahead of itself,

passing outside of bus windows,

leaving you like a widow holding mementos,

lingering inanimate, like dreams

but bound by desire,

put out like smoldering ash.

It glows for a time

before it goes cold as a concrete floor.

The concrete was no longer necessary,

now awash with shadows of selves and no more.

All these shades in the life of a candle,

its gradual disintegration,

eventual integration with the whole,

again it goes dark

until I receive another spark of insight.

Pushed to the edge of here or there,

into the tight chair of words.

All the solitude I can bear,

all the encouragement I will hear

goes unspoken in silent symphony.

This impulse to record resumes eternally,

with the curves of your words reflected in mirrors.

The eyes that read them growing wider,

distorted, out of proportion,

blurring into the next page.

Keep turning

this toiled land.

Something to plant seeds in,

until it has grown deformed,

like a kicked in pumpkin

unrecognizable to itself

and from where it began,

invoking a response to begin again,

from where it flaunts a collective pain.

The mind holds no silence.

Hunched over paper,

eyes dropping from frustration,

thoughts like a vapor.

I’m weary and unaware

of day or night,

all is amorphous and white

as this barely caressed skin

no longer draped with letters,

like walls, all is stone-still.

Even the crickets behind it are silent.

The palms barely sway,

only to clutch at desperate pens,

here for hours and then days,
perhaps eternity is a passenger

in a sedentary vehicle.

Longing for Lozzi’s Monte Carlo

or trains that pierce Sicily,

anything that will not adhere

to this empty time-table,

this sibling to despair,

Cain slaying Abel.

Does the line still survive?

The pen no longer moves,

with a passing wind.

It used to leave fragments,

the charred remains of flames,

it was there and unnamed,

the unseen taking me in,

pushing to reveal something beyond expectation,

 if only in words,

taking curves,

running on their own tracks

with the sound of needles that scratch

a finished record,

it seems there are no more revolutions.

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