Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space…
New latitudes, unknotting, soon glue place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
          —Crane¹

                    i.

Gathering horizons at the precipice, the copper bend
in the taut trip-wire of the cliff’s edge
acknowledges one’s end, lifts a heel of broken
earth its carbon-scorched footprint disturbs, pauses first, abhors
the coming pains of karmic rebirth, ponders what
is deserved, shifts gears, and peers forward then
reverses, peers backward then again forward, seeking in
silence for an answer the moment cannot word,
the truth patience cannot afford, competing with existence
contemplating deep in the basin of the bottomless

bowl below, in the abyss of the pit’s
Narcissus mirror which is Achilles’ shield, the stinging
blow soon to be revealed and incontrovertibly known,
the shedding and shattering of this soul’s bony
carapace, accounting the cost of breaking open and
out of, then throwing away, the prison cell
hermitage of the shell, coast-ripe salt sprays its
diaphanous knots into smug mouths of yawning wind,
grinning and groaning whiffs up yearning thighs whispering
within the sighing of rising tides, ‘Too much

sacrifice leads to martyrdom, the antidote is always
in the poison,’ and yet to be changed by the sea
into this, no longer like Henry the Fifth,
oblivious to the crimes which brought my father
to his throne, I’ll take up the crown
awhile before throwing it down, hazarding with circumspect
confidence an innocuous offering to tempestuous Oceanus, in
whose bent fist-shaken urn of a typhoon whorl
the tears and ashes of my castaway past
drowns, sinking like silver tossed into howling bowels

                    ii.

of a well wary of its wish, loosening
the stones of a heart’s walls eager to
pass off its misplaced trust, by then no
longer averse to ending the world now so
that it does not get any worse, I
don’t want to be a symbol or an
example, I want to be a metaphor, something
stronger than what I represent for strangers, to
be bled of what others expect, every last
drop, out of the Phœnix-nest of my anger’s

restless and resilient resistance against predetermined patterns to
become what I am and listened to for
once, not ossify into what I have already
been, what I was yesterday I am not
today, no sir, no madam, I am not
your friend, a shape in a space I
will never occupy again, let me point you
in the right direction to get away from
what I have seemed so that you can
reinvent me in your imagination, with what spills

from my pen paint my personality not my
portrait, note the difference between the sign and
the signified is a verb of being, to
exist is to reject the subjective, to be
the object itself, to just put into practice
a new perspective whenever the old point of
you proves no longer affective, understand this: reality
is the story that matter tells the mind,
myth changes it, Christians go on so much
about repenting which, by their definition, this process

                    iii.

is, because a crossroads is cruciform in more
than name only, two arms, two legs, four
ways, expand with me into increasing circles of
new latitudes, concentric evanescence transcending the wounds of
the soaring afflicted, time’s victims desperate and wishing
to free themselves of this cycle of enlightenment,
serpent tongues striking at wisdom with the forked
lightning of wickedest apotheosistic genius, only to be
deceived by its fleeting appearance above the surface,
seek beneath the obvious the dubious illusive key

to all concealed meaning, see in what you
are not seeing the spirit whose essence you
are seeking, meet me without the cloak of
a lie, denuded of my might in my
stride between gallops, be enamoured of an unarmoured
knight in the liminal moment where the wound
kisses goodbye its bandages before abandoning them, all
of this has only been a crutch, every
reinvention crushing under the wheel of my chariot
highwaymen masked by night, grabbing at my life

the way fire envies its own light, swallow
then, this caveat, envision what I’ve been getting
at, and devour before I metamorphose what I
pour forth: this exclusive glimpse of my bruises’
truth obscured by the lather of my wanderlust’s
confusion of Venusian foam, I am wherever I
go, a crude rumour always at home in
the mouth of somebody I used to know,
but with whom I won’t linger any longer.

__________
¹Hart Crane, “[Part] IV[.] Cape Hatteras” of The Bridge, [Stanza 6, Lines 79–80, 90–91], in “Poems of Hart Crane” of Complete Poems of Hart Crane: Edited by Marc Simon, published at New York by Liveright in 2001; page 79.