For Maxilla & Mandible, a key to tongue, to keep sung secrets once leaked, to speak to open mouths, to break open lips breath wishes to blow apart, to translate need to want, captive to free, to breathe in that liminal space between life and death states, these words I impart—

                    *

[O]ptimi consiliarii mortui[.] / The best advisors are dead.
          —Bacon¹

                    i. O∴O (Orbicularis Oris) • Buccinator • “Sorrow is Joy”

Eremitical beardo bookin’
it solo—openin’ it more like
a portal than a window into
a world few know // Among shadows in

solitude & silence, flash of wisdom
in darkness, how it hits you, then goes,
blows out before hubris can blow up
ego’s fatal signal boost, delays

gratification that instant it’s
wanted, coming unsought, does what love
ought, humiliates one hard with its
open hand & winking palm, slapping the

shit out of none & all // Minerval Owl
initiating those its counsel
calls to keep watch, how once nightfallen
angles each walk, circumambulate

walls those fortresses of unaddressed
shadow disavow, tallest towers
angels less knowledgeable, somehow,
than souls whose wells of shovelled snow are

                    ii. O∴O • Triangularis • “Change is Stability”

frozen hells closing over holes breath
hollowed, their sawed wings afloat as they
unfollow friends with devils above
& below // Wonder at how full & awful

these lifeboats are whose bodies lost shades
more restless than they who wander fate
after dark bestow with late rescues
only losses know, stranger shapes than

the pyramids thrown against bone with
sinister intent this parade of
numbers grows, for in haste & in vain the
one whose pain hours measure days ignore,

every denied pleasure this born
hermit foregoes for naught as he does
also his lamp, attention spanning
its bridge across a vastness of steppe

dissonance gaps, the black sound ashen
as it is vacuous, pens tracking
every pass this abyss demands
of oracles no one else has the

                    iii. O∴O • Caninus • “Selflessness is Self”

wherewithal or balls to ask // Dripped ink
dropped birthing nude hopes mountainous tasks
attract, the project this—that mission
to accomplish the beginning those

who went before let end, opening
of the heart to another’s hand the
way the mind itself does when faced with
lips indifferent to criticism

of strangers attempting to condemn
quick what within them seen in others
openly accepted they censor
with punishment only the lonely

can amend, fictions worry invents
for heads heavy with regret to let
necromancers better equipped fix,
since the best advisors are dead yet

listening for answers in stillness
instills, besides patience, discipline
unlike education’s dividends
traditional medicine lessens.

__________
¹Francis Bacon, «XX. De Consilio [The Council]», in «Sermones Fideles, sive Interiora Rerum [The Sermons of the Faithful, or the Interior of Things]» of «Opera Civilia et Moralia [Civil and Moral Works]» in The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England: Vol. V., published at London by Andrew Millar in 1765; page 380.