Exhiled to Octoberland

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Oxen of the Sun 406

He is young, now
Reading the months and days
So he can say to himself
“I have a lucky heart.”
But the name of change is fulfilled
In the shadows and rain
His sons come close and hold up the mirror
To his dark eyes and he sees himself
A knight errant
A royal flood
The terror of the world
The breath of twilight which wills the darkness
Beholden to morning he flees this illusion
And recedes into this hard day
Where he exchanges substance
With the mist.

For Paul Yarmoluk

I Feel Like I've Been Here Before

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Oxen of the Sun 405

The other laugh is gone
Life eyes us with a ghastly surprise
We are invested in the instant
Met only when the flesh of heaven
Is in its final stage of
Loathing and forbidden horror
The repeated seer vanishes
And is replaced with emotion
This dark soul overcome
A secret name of ordinance
A mystery ghost drinking in relief
A curse
A haunted rat
A distant eye a drunken crowd
Dissipates and finally disappears
An instance of tears
The thing is done!

In the Eye of the Sun

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Oxen of the Sun 404

A creature of peril a
Veritable Aristotle superman human
Born of castigation find your
Heat as if carried through with
Authority with copulation the
Impression of the Minotaur occasions
A desire of supreme entertainment
You are made for metamorphosis
You are made for abnormality
You are made for hypothetical sadness
You were handed down from alleged explanation
You were found among the words but then shortlived
But then made of native conjunction
But then better known as argument
But then arisen from madame god
But then left in a forbidding country
On a pile of syringes
On a pile of monsters
On a rock of fable

Every Prison Has Its Angry Music

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Oxen of the Sun 403

So our joyous beauty fades
A day secure in chinless fratricide
We restrain our affairs in order
To attend this reluctant ceremony of
Exotic doctrine
Of simultaneous absence
Of wrongful miscarriage
We are aquatic yet stillborn
Our ear is full of sleep and heir to
unannounced consequence
if we could only hear the terms of
our angry sentence; this would be the
moment of our domestic evisceration
of our defective acquittal
the moment of twilight
when we display certain memorable exhaustion
and the moment when we broke the king.

At the Coast of Snow

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Oxen of the Sun 402

The kind empire, unhappy, forgets
Its virtue and freely couples with angels
What noble habit acquires its enemies so persistently?
Oblivious to feelings we admit our alien daughters
To the art of respect
This low and notorious society gone
These habits, fallow
We come to find our nearer enemy forgotten
We come to join in the title of laughter
Did we not rise up in this distant moment?
Did we not gaze without scruple at the notorious gospel of nature?
Unhappy, indignant, we seize the feathers of the deluder.

Vaporizing Dreams

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Oxen of the Sun 400

I am always misshapen by my transgressions
In the instance of excellence I am ejected
From the profession of deity
But then I am repaired
Indeed full of extravagance
And middle knowing
The low design is not glorious but
It does contain the seeds of happiness
Collected with some hasty sentiment,
witnesses murmur as the heart ripens
With age and language
Holding it’s scrupulous breath
The honor of malice -
The horror of design makes this creation momentous
I speak to my own skull
And allot the color of spirit.


Oxen of the Sun 401

The genius of motion is the
Notion of expectancy of
insolvency lost of frigid spirit
The fault of our pain is
finding in precaution
We request proof of our existence
We hold ourselves in stillness
We forbid mercy for our being
The word of readiness bursts the child
It rises in glory clapping Hallelujah Hallelujah
Timing for emphasis and rejoicing in the cold
Air of occasional holiness
We have lost all our judgers
Intercepting their intolerance with the
Ordeal of ascendancy
Our opinions will slice us
Unless we rise.

We Are All Pretenders

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Oxen of the Sun 399

This humorless bath of primrose path
This thing I have taken
So is the birth of a bird to a monstrous
Surgeon patience.
I have spoken here of butterflies
Squirming of feigning
Women with tongues of choking
Philosophers who,
When discovering their immodest blood
Become bits of flesh and tinkling hearts
Become the word of departure
Become the retreat of modesty
And the signal to sally forth
With only beautiful providence for comfort
The eye knows its excuses.

Simple Tyrannies

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Oxen of the Sun 398

Polished hands point to luckless joy
Replaced by pictures of good
A wet umbrella in a circle
The thunder is a simple, imperfect passion
A violent god
A speech of petty tyranny
We quit the instant
The eye wanders from a far worse tomorrow
This, then is our more accomplished disorder
We affect tenderness
Remember me when you welcome the new day.

Whose Troubled Boats Disappear

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Oxen of the Sun 397

Upon a proper prayer
Offered politely to the prostatic stranger
The civil disease that has befallen us
We are lavished with a happy passage
Obliging us to leave this silly century behind
To bow out early while a narrator achieves heaven
And we are left to accept the leftovers
A most excellent opportunity of the wombless
our nearest neighbor overjoyed
As we part at the point
Ecstasy through our pain
A cheery belly full of violent congratulations
An excellent distance now becomes atmosphere
As we disappear
Into laughter.

World Without Memory

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Oxen of the Sun 396

A gentleman
After grace
A life of grade
A fulfilled intention
Of a delivered contention
Boiled in malice
Over coals of Newcastle
A simple matter
Of prolific rain
A simple matter
Of forest animata
A simple matter
Of expected purpose
A simple matter
Of pain overtaken
Of dutiful fashion
Of memory persuaded
Asking the water
A simple matter
Of erect quotation
And naming the flesh.

We Are Accustomed To Each Other's Sadness

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Oxen of the Sun 395

A Gentleman, agreeable, standing,
Grieved by his own invitation
a hundred pleasures of worthy intention
The hearer now here devotes himself
To a form of early withdrawal
Expounding the happiness of the hand
be idle yet acquire the state of roundness
Where seated to account for vilest of
occasion, attending the task of handing
form the business of civil war
accompanied by engines of weeping
touching our names with a bit of color
while causing a defect in hearing
stilling the jewel of the heart
waking the inconvenient morning.

Dream of Paralysis

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Oxen of the Sun 394

A pampered pronoun grows amok
To mannered speech
But floats luffing
Sails no longer erect in
Black cold named afternoon
Half the wild world is now at war
While the other half dreams
Of belonging to the wind.
Like a discovered island
Found sure and spare of fancy
We take our royal pelts and load the
Bundles of language woven, ungrateful
And weighing anchor, put out to evening
Looking for new worlds.