i.

Half dust, half deity, offer
me anything but the self-obliteration
I crave, in the silence
of my seeking unashamed to
believe a new soul in

the making might from within
ache to stretch its legs
and spread his wings as
the shade of a person
he shakes off, taking on

my shape, indecent as an
expletive unexpurgated from my misery’s
lived treatise, more at ease
midway between the mortals and
their gods, hopelessly pitched in

                    ii.

suspended peril betwixt and against
my sins and the bitter
alchemy of their unrelenting elements,
a vessel into which pour
self-absorbed storms, mine is the

art of transforming my heart’s
hurt into artwork, mercurial as
Los Angeles viewed through a
sour mood’s acrid blur my
silver-rimmed aviators through mirrors of

lenses filter as the jet
circles its plastic urban mass
the way prayers do when
said over a wound, tracing
in its map of arteries

                    iii.

and smog from above what
in New York this bleak-weathered
magic of departure turned to
arrival by all accounts now
recalls, two behemoth brothels of

brawling metropolises separated by a
continent yet brothers, insofar as
everyone there is a transplant
from somewhere afar, reinventing who
they are at the cost

of who they were, what
self-creation in a name’s making
for the sake of forsaking
plain living for taking on
fame’s mantle has not plagued

                    iv.

its victim with sacrificial scar,
for in my descent onto
its river of tar, LAX
makes an inkling of more
sense when intoned as a

charm, with JFK’s dissonant call
the nominæ magicæ of The
Fool, whose card this tarot
pulls hard, attracted as I
always have been since boyhood

to all that is dark,
The Hermit, The Magician, The
Hierophant, The Emperor whose balls
my power moves crystallize whenever
I saunter instead of crawl

                    v.

from crippling doubt to what
tall order becoming the me
I choose to be has
become, not even The Tower
could thunder with bolts enough

to unsettle or humble one
so comfortable as I am
with moving on, with resurrecting
here what others there never
accepted someone so inevitably drawn

to quarters where performers gather
could ever pull off, scripting
my own fate while my
assistant screens all my calls,
I am Byron’s Manfred, evolved!