Category: Verse

  Could I embody and unbosom now
  That which is most within me,—could I wreak
  My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
  Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
  All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
  Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word,
  And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
  But as it is, I live and die unheard,
  With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

I find I am awake, disembodied. 
Dawn’s first penetrating light 
flecked off the green, dewed leaf. 
A vast, strafed maw, a dark chasm appears.
Now fears, poorly forgotten, 
borne like ungainly sacks, resurge
to haul me over the edge. 

One and nine in the making, 
willow wept, a salt sack,
mannacled in an emerald eye.
tempest-taken in a sucking 
weather world. you, in a gilt rage 
nailed on a hell’s highway, 
poured the sky’s joy from a hidden spring.