City of Legends

I loved the new poem I referred to in the previous posting so much that I went ahead and rescued it from potential annihilation, posting it to both www.authorsden.com and my Random Drafts and Chapters blog. It is called More Than Gods Can Comprehend, and if you are the kind of putz who doesn’t like sensitive, soul-searching, wrench your heart out passion, you’ll hate it. Go away.

Romantic? Yes. Classicist? yes! Fool? Well, that remains to be seen. I am incorporating it into the collection of stories Tales of Aubergine and the Amomancer.

I am working now to figure out how in God’s name I can follow as crooked a path as there will be for the readings tour…maybe it is too ambitious? Nah, I need the distraction.

I have only one ambition in this life, anymore.

Hey, guess who surfaced yesterday after a few years out of my universe? The Selke! Wow. I’m running out of lost souls to bump into. Is Jimmy Hoffa out here in the blogosphere?

Tomorrow is my mother’s 75th birthday!

No, not here, not yet.

This evening it opened up. They opened up. The gates of heaven.  All of them, and I was treated to perhaps the greatest stream of consciousness display of extemporaneous poetry I’d ever encountered (Bruce Autry of Poetry Heaven once described me as the greatest extemporaneous poet, very nice of him since I’d just stolen his lover. Sorry, Bruce, I should have let you hang onto her.)

But this evening a line popped into my head…

I will run the minefield

and it came in that singsong poetry reading tone that tells me its time to pull over and grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Er, pen. Er, needle and write in blood.

I will run the minefield
and you will stand and smile at my folly

And it came like a cocaine-crazed porn star. Line after line after line after line.

I will run the minefield
dodging from experience
falling like a broken promise
when I get cocky or careless
and my last line blows up in my face
to send me back to "go" without two hundred dollars
or a kiss

I am exhausted. And I need to go back over it and edit it (yes, edit it…not that it emerged less than perfect, but I may have transcribed it poorly under the circumstances).

dodging and dancing at speeds you have never seen
as I race towards you, arms open,
bounding like a radiant tiger
who knows well the smell of your sweet hair

I will let you know when it is ready. Candy, thanks for major inspiration, you are my star, my angel and my brave little peacat.

I will run the minefield
I will run the minefield
I will run the minefield

I will run the minefield
every day for the rest of my life
just to taste heaven in your arms

Yeah, it is good.

etude in infrared and ultraviolet

There is nothing like solitude. Nothing.

It is the echo of thought, caught in its own backwash,
burning with the denials that you’d hoped to hear.

But if silence is violence, the echo is worse,
a curse from an indifferent universe.

And then, the fire.
Atoms torn apart and the heart bursts in flames
that once were hung on other names,
now focused in an coherent heat.
Sweet. Redshifting blue and true
and though you know the symptoms
you cannot know the disease
that pleases and teases and finally releases
you to tumble in three axes.

Vectors Hectoring hexes undone
and analyzed with the eye of a jeweler.
Midwifed lives with a familiar scent
that went with something softer once.

I have stood in the fire.
Endured it and been cured by it
until my flesh curled and hurled it out
to only find it falling back into my gravity well,
too far from other suns
to ever relinquish or extinguish.

Flames with a fury transcendent and unrepentant.

Solid to liquid to gas to plasma
to that which remains with the furnace cools
a thousand lives from now.

With no more answers than there were today.
Quests test the best in us.

There is nothing like solitude. Nothing.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Final poem for tonight…I think!

The Kiss of the Chrysalis

The kiss of the chrysalis is upon me now,
bitter brickle tickles of something I forgot.
The final grains spiral and fall, as sentries bow:
I am released, again, to spin like musket shot
fired in the dark, but inspired by instinct
that knows the sound of pounding feet is an omen
not to be ignored as Polyphemus had blinked
and missed the fist of fate aimed at his eye, the men
not willing to settle for a kettle of stew
as a watery grave of savory penance.
Pride, a bride to consequence, oaths are now so new
you can see them wet in the moonlight, the sentence
is life. Guilt washed away with karma for a kiss,
burdens set aside with faint fear of honest bliss.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

In appreciation of advice to accept this joy and lay aside my pain. It will be hard, but I won’t be alone. For once.

I promise, a last post for now. Later, or at least tomorrow.

the riddle

I draw out the words in soft sigils in the dust.
dust left behind to grind the soles of our shoes
slowly to powder to join it in the streets, defeated.
for all things turn to ash and trash and crash
to the ground with sound or not depending on
if anyone is there to listen. or care.
I am thousands of miles from daylight, bright
and articulate and warming in a way that I need
like you need water and air and a pillow for your head.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

the sun rests fierce

the sun rests fierce in eyes newly opened, the nerves raw
in the afterbirth of creation. illumination sought burns
and churns and turns corners on the rough-edged ledges
where once we played and prayed the way we had been taught,
not how we discovered to be consistent with the universe.

curses are not vows, vows are not the sacred cows we slaughter
at the edge of water turned red and cloudly as loudly we call
after fallen idols, the skeletons of memories mocked by those
who sought and bought the emperor’s clothes, the better to take
to wake to break the fall we all must dare if we are to care.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

I will dance

I will dance with knives of thought
tonight
as I contemplate the errors in my path.
arrows
I can not accept within the margined
errors.
only Heracles can restrain himself in
the fight.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

journey’s end

There will be times when the sorrows overtake me
and even seem to be of a mind to break me.
Yet time has shown me not so fragile a soul
to crack and fall at the whims of fates’ control.

I am not stone. But I am not alone, not anymore
and I can roar my defiance at the skies as I soar
on wings of glass and gossamer, woven by you
to let me touch the blithe angels you bring, anew.

Beauty I had forgotten in the shadows of despair,
the taste of gentle jasmine on your skin and in your hair.
You’re the answer to all riddles I had at length perceived
to be of Gordian strands and bands, or so I had believed.

But you are brighter than the sun and softer than the wind,
a mentor to my mysteries, confessor where I’d sinned
against the God and gods of love and life I’d sworn
to follow without doubt or fail, to seek a birthright born.

My gratitude knows no limits, my desire knows no lack,
my passion is for all you are and all you’d give me back
for the caustious, earnest footsteps that I took up to your door
at the end of my life’s questing, to know love forevermore.

William F. Devault. all rights reserved.

I will go to ground and write poetry for a time, as that is what I do.