Oran's Well

 

Dear Wolfgang, I write to you because the other day
a screaming came across the sky, and searching for
a way to describe it bids me begin and end with you.

I know it’s strange, hearing from a poet who’s curious
about the sound of wind not air, stranger even than
a fan letter which may or may not bear semblance or

resonance any more in rock n roll, the greats like
your father gone or in dotages long silent (either from
amplified ear damage or the quietude which lengthens,

like shadows in late summer, precisely where the
big night music no more croons its oceanned sins).
I am familiar with your career, carrying on where

your father Ed once stood with you — a privilege
of course but hardly nepotism, you played hard
and loud as soon you could stand the brew of

much older men playing on for that youthful
vibe only you by then could truly, maybe even
passionately, imbibe — your father and uncle

playing licks by then written like ogham on
their aging brainstems, winging all the old hits
where adoration is purest and maybe cannot die,

not until the last concert goer heaves his last
exultant sigh. But Eddie did fade as you
played on, cliffside the height of falling angels;

you watched the silence grow around him like
a caul as he faltered into the usual long damage —
aging out so tardily from teenaged rock ‘n’ roll,

booze, divorce, solitary houses pouring more booze,
the glowing tip of too many cigarettes in dark
and darker rooms, guitars stringing themselves

for airs beyond all wind, power chords hammering
the already broken: So that when throat cancer
revealed the massive hole your father had fallen in

the strokes were blessed knells, erasing hells
he alone knew the awful volume of; then let go,
become the sound of applause in a distant shell.

Quite the freight for any son — it’s hard to even
measure it in kind — you pairing with your father
on the biggest stages of crass teen-boy scorn

is as unlike any spectacle of the norm, old
and new year king on one Tara of scalt song,
a concert’s worth of unnaturals abiding that long.

I feel akin in my own way, my father the gay
preacher lifting all those fucking stones, turning
back the Christian homilies toward pagan drone

wordless and inexpressible except in starlight
standing taller than any living son may go
while I wrote songs and chased bar crones

long and late and later beyond all sensate knowns
until my father’s last sigh winged these poems
attesting to a ghostly stream across the flown.

The only way to go on from here is to tell you
not about the recent enactment of that scream
but what I heard the summer of 1979 at a Black

Sabbath concert opened by Van Halen, your
dad’s band fresh on the heels of their first LP
and bristling with an entire career loud ahead,

cracking and releasing its first wide thunder.
Standing in darkness, the band began with
a wild eerie ban sidhe comic-con shriek

coming from this contraption by your dad
that looked like an evil R2D2, red and green
lights blinking in the device’s hood as what

lurked below delivered its wild transcription
of a scream across the sky, cueing “Running With
the Devil” and the leaping crashing fuck-wreaked

cry of Van Halen in its freshest first glass vintage,
a fountain of effervescent rocking raunch
bardolatry, commanded by the leaping god inside

your father’s Frankenstrat, whatever tombs
split wide and vast delivering fast arpeggios
in winged horse whupass repast. My first real

band was close to playing its first real gig
about that time, and I won’t lie — I prayed
devout for the right to stand where your father

streaked a guitar into a sear of burning air.
Thank the gods I was humbled of all hope
of that by doing what all wannabes pretend,

standing at the bar in Rod Stewartean
swagger & settling for the dames of closing
time — garage band hack forever til

I ran out of luck and liver and last dime.
Thankfully that came soon enough — I
played my last gig before I turned 30 —

turning, as the hammered call humble pie,
to quieter equipment on lesser stages
where screaming’s just a blatant metaphor

for fresh lament sung loud by the dead.
I chucked the big night music for the sound
of waters surging up a dark verse well,

the cleff and signature of words that fell
like manna from a screaming cross the sky —
partly from your father, from mine too,

but echoing a stark reminder to the line
which opens the novel Gravity’s Rainbow,
Pynchon’s book of the postmodern dead.

The screaming there begins with an
ICBM crossing Earth to Heaven and back
from Russia toward LA where the Author

behind his mask is sitting in the Orpheum
Theater awaiting Rilke on the silver screen
to begin his dancing and romancing Elegies

when A screaming comes across the sky.
a nuclear sonnet of white noise, announcing,
if not transformation, then a shiny future

cobbled by its annihilators , those plucky
German rocket scientists who worshipped
the Zero and foretold the One’s arc and

glittery fall, became our ruined digital domain
and distracted disaffected misinformed and
hearsed refrain. Which brings me closer

(patience, my friend) to this latest Scream.
God (for who else am I writing this letter to,
guised as the son of a dead guitar hero?), how

nothing that I’d known or seen came close
to the magic monster precision your father’s
guitar as it careened way out on the farthest,

iciest, most delicate harrow of off-cliff solo —
druid feathers to trespass the portico beyond
which only fire may trespass, profane and pure

as singularities go and the holy antimatters
they blackhole just off the cliffs, reversing cliffs
which us mortals cannot see nor party whole.

The amplitude of a hard rock concert in
1979 (that’s what we called the music then)
was the decibel’s excalibration into sheer

massive electrified whale bloat — me and
my bass player left the arena after Van Halen’s
set, nothing to compare in like except volume

in Black Sabbath’s stink-skulled fake-your-death
mace alphabet — indeed, all the vendors in the
lobby were stuffing cotton in their whining ears —

Like them I’ve never found a way to describe
your dad’s magnitude except as god-like, Rome
writ larger with badass Jupiter in charge, his bolts

enveloped in stage rigging and transformers
with enough voltage to poleaxe and noose
Dionysos with tintinnabulations archly goosed.

A screaming, yes, but sad to say, across an appliance
sky, big and loud and chrome because what seems
like Ariel merely bassifies his dreamy truth,

a howling way to whimper silver sooth.
So we were young: Amen and ‘nuff said:
few survive aging out on top of their music

and the world never gives one starry shit.
The drummer of my first band died even
before I quit, his second liver failing exactly

where tom-toms had flatlined the hammer
not even whiskey bottles could romance.
Last time I saw Rudy, his head swelled

pumpkin-huge from the anti rejection drugs,
his skin yellow as the exhaust from his
hot Deuce Coup, frosted too with early cold.

Then gone: No more screaming from that boy
who drummed and sang Sex Pistols songs
with such leather cockproud fucking joy.

If any of us should have made it toward
your father’s stage, it was Rudy: But paths
are weirdly shaped by screamings crossed,

bisecting past and future upside their cost
and revealing mysteries in history’s exhaust.
As when this past weekend a bullet passed

a presidential candidate’s head so close its ghost
was caught on camera — a screaming past
upending all the settings we thought stone cast.

A silly millimeter left of path and that round
would have spelt disaster massed — so we’ve
learned from other AR-15 murder sprees —

and though one poor sucker down the line
of fire was killed and two more disrupted
by exploding guts, instead we got what wasn’t

meant to pass, scream transforming into mast
which mounts the sail which breezes past
to destinies and dooms and bodily sorrows,

country harrows noosed by godly hallows.
Or not. For sure though the scream’s echo
lingers long and late across this overheated land,

building storms no summers can relieve.
(Killer tornadoes in upstate New York as
hurricane Beryl exhausts her latter seethe,

Arkansas drowned in flash floods from rain
too incessant to believe.) Maybe screams
have lost their means to fade, ripping on

and on through like debts repaid with poison
earned by what we cannot bring ourselves to grieve
and oceans burned by trash we obscenely wreathe.

It’s hard not to sense bleak transits are here,
spreading fast out from that errant bullet’s sear.
Yes, a screaming came across a perfect blue

Pennsylvania sky, whizzing unheeded past
the ghost wreckage of United Flight 93
crashed September 11, 2001, whinging

now as then its harp- and bow-string cry,
eruption’s imbas which too paints the eye
with maddened visions of the winter groupie,

Tawny Kitaen become the Cailleach of Brr.
As for you, my dear Wolfie, I pray the time
reveals to you which thunder you truly possess —

the white grind of the ever-rocking blessed
or uproaring Crom’s deranged clapblast
killing what’s already dead in encored blast.

On days like this it sure is hard to tell:
One moment sweetly surly, the next so
rank and furry, the third both not and so.

I shouldn’t leave you like this, so I’ll mend
the net of words enough to let black water go,
a weir, if you will for the salmon still near here

who tastes like time in less raucous sear:
Keep on truckin’, as the old boys used to say.
Dark roads are where the big wheels pray.

My father heard that screaming in the burn
ward of Great Lakes Naval Hospital after WWII,
from sailors whose faces were blast echoes

of caved pumpkins set by lakes of burning oil
as their ships went down in cold salt abyss.
A singular note of unearthly loud despair

choired by the boys in their white sheeted beds
bleeding out and breathing their last, finished
by the scream at last. My father was just an

orderly — eighteen years old, not yet out of
his sexual closet, desiring and consoling as
he held those young men’s hands in prayer,

the warmth of human touch becoming stone
which my father later lifted up to starlight
transforming in his way that awful sound

into a stream of lucence for the sacred eye
to bourne the heft of dead earth we all carry,
and I bequeath to this summer harrows poem.

You’ve made your father’s music your own, as kin
and kind can truly and may only do; survive and
thrive and die of it as your own fate commends.

Hell, who am I talking to? The angel who carries
this to God is itself a screaming made, changing
if not the air then the ether which I’ve parlayed

assuaging just what matters when a screaming
creases our common air. It’s not the first time
I’ve heard or seen or read or writ it, so excuse

the familiarity, which extends a certain wisdom
humbled by its metaphor. King Suibhne was driven
mad at the Battle of Magh Rath in 637 AD

by a screaming in the sky; looking up he beheld
a heaven rent by Crom’s troop clashing loudly by
in peals of thunder and lightings of the mind.

Went mad and leapt and leapt again, feathering
the outcast geilt’s tree leaping song. Some say Mad
Sweeney was cursed by St. Ronan, but that’s just

later explanation for the airy spectacle enseamed
by the sound of firmaments upending and rending
with that ghostly Wild Hunt of doom screamed.

How do I know? I trust the agate of the ripping mean,
straight from the lips of those who fin the tank
where history dreams. All these summer days

so hot and building storms was just the Maker’s rasp,
gliding coarse stones cross the long scythe blade
so that the present scream may echo hauntings vast

through all the velds and vales where it had been
and that memory awaken to the nightmare keen
which tracks in darkness what brilliance begins.

Aren’t you glad this isn’t in anything you truly
had to read, my Wolfie? So when events begin
to foam and bray and take hoof to leap away

remember the sound your dad made after
a screaming came across what he called sky:
And closely watch the rooks for banshee fry,

they’ll get you every time you look too high.
Hot and muggy with more storms today;
tonight that man accepts his party’s crown.

Lucky fucker, don’t you think? But I say watch
the eyes. See if the tracer is still racing there
between the ghost threat and graved derriere,

the one plus zero of our weal’s dead stare
awakened to the zombie fare streaming now
in letters to a scream with Muzak in its cowl.

Will the thing explode and how? You never know,
said the whisper in the mask to that scruffy crew
which wolves the high air screaming through.

 

July 2024, reposted April 2026

 

KD’Verse Poets’ Letters in a Poem

Whatever hope that spring unfurls is fleeting.
Easter came and went again. The jasmine
blossoms now bugling their God perfume
will soon droop and drop like used tissues.
Then the broil of summer which autumn not
that much later will strangle for the coming
winter’s defeat. The earth gives us just one season
to find paradise and then throws in its towel.
Even Jesus didn’t remain around for long
after walking from His tomb. Just forty days
of showing up at feasts spooking the bejeezus
out of the apostles. And then He split for Heaven,
lifting skyward on the first cloud of summer.
Perhaps the contrast between living and immortal
is too great to conceive on Earths as fragile
as ours. We needed greater wings of glory,
a way to shout spring blossoms through Heaven’s
gate. Hope in unseen majesty was exactly what
we needed to defeat the tragedy of life. Two
thousand years later we’ve gotten very good
at almost beating death, this dying planet
our tragic proof. We live on too long inside
these vastly tinkered bodies, every comfort
and diversion hunkering us further down
while the raging seasons blow worse outside.
Hope kept our gaze fixed beyond starlight
when nights might have taught us darkness.
When we might learned the importance of
parachutes when flying over Kansas.
Wings of rapture never could suffice
when real ones truly fail. Falling is so much
worse than flying when highest Heaven
is a fast-approaching field of wheat. Hope
welcomes us home, if not exactly to glory
at least the almost triumph of the faith
which alone survives our fated ends.
Singing Hallelujah and Glory Be to Thee
like a grand piano of blooming jasmine
trellising the angel note above high C
which tomorrow resurrects in freezing rain,
the hope of spring eternal fooling us again.

April 2014, revised and reposted April Fools 2026

Submitted to D’Verse Poets False Spring Challenge

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

—Whitman

To every dream a welling from sources far below,
mixing myth and mundane me-fluff in its flow.
This one started from its deep end, lysis first,
backassed in its arrears: I saw a secret schematic
of the sacred mystery, St. Oran as the sacrifice
that wells the purest source of truth from
the Goddess who oceans rebirth under all.

Oran the ancient bridge between the end
of this life and our birthing in the third world,
the Otherworldly hostel of the ever-living dead.
Wow, I thought deeply a-dream, there it is,
the well and source I’ve long searched for
but got no closer than a shore’s beachhead.

And then, as if rising toward first waking thought,
the gleaming bubble lifted up through the
eterne She domains then broke, dropping
me in some mid-league office of the nightly mass:
There my father was, young and virile
of Godly purpose, just as he might have been
(or was) in the late 1960s when he worked
downtown Chicago with falling principalities
in purple distaff daze. Maybe he was me
in my former careering days, addling
and purposed in the same wrong ways.

He was to present his case for Oran
in a proposal I had helped him write
(a concept of colossal obligation
and at costs glossed nigh exorbitant)
to the corporate CEO of the world’s most
prestigious newspaper, in a swank and
bespoke office atop a Gotham highrise.

A fella, you might say, as close to God
in our dim world and my profane history,
that waking one I now dimly ruefully
recall — and apt, ergo, for the dream’s
marina of plural deus ex machinas.

I was trying to help my father prep
for the meeting, hurrying about the
bowels of that flagship tower, rushing
in and out of stockroom bowelry,
hoofing a long staircase where reporters
who looked like ’30s gangsters chatted
about their assignments walking
down and out into distraction’s dust.

Time was running out — minutes maybe?
years? What starry metronome tocks
the ghost who springs the landing gears?)
Almost none, that was sure, to finish
all I felt I still must do, helping my dead
father make his case for Oran to the
corpse head of a dead industry, asking
for corporate approval and full investment
in the living waters of the ever dead.

I woke with a startling and riven thought
— what the fuck? —  such a sight I’d seen.
And thanked the weller of the dream
for that long laborious and fraught staircase
now before me as it has ever been,
rising and descending a hallowed brim.
When my work ends may that well hymn
the Oran every basement burial begins.
Now to work, to work: and then a sleep
and ferry-work you call dreaming deep.

A door opened; my father was called in.
His briefcase full of tides and elevations
soon not silenced nor forgot but reapt,
upwelling golden granaries of the slept.
My work now swings a singing scythe,
ferrying the gleam Oran flings upleapt.
Your work soon, to myth my death
and silo every shore where Lethe tides.

March 2026

Five decades studying five thousand years
of human misery and mystery and you get
this poem, its teeny well-lid pulled aside
for one dim and musty peek at truth.
I know, you’re sure hoping this poem
will get it fucking right enough,
waltzing its billow of starlight, jizz
and wisecracks through poetry’s
appointed arches, abandoned by
the living Hollywood empires ago.

Who knew that skinny waif dork of a gilla
studying on his bed in a leaky basement
dorm room the winter of 1974 would be
the one elected by the sidhe of dead poets
to marrow, harrow and hallow the need,
greed and seethe of Truth for his time?

One could easily understand why poetry
was fucked, keyholing this next pimply
inheritor of Keats and Stevens: Sitting
there failing to gloze the night’s Western
Civ assignment about Emperor Nero and
the sack of Angelsey in Wales, the druids
screaming failed curses while the sacred
grove burned flat: A sound thinned to
five-point miniscule while Jimmy Page soloed
to “Since I Been Lovin’ You,’ braying on
the cheap stereo speakers which bookend
the boy’s hopeless college career. This
boob would be the one to spin
the mundo’s gangrene entire?

Disappointment tinges with terror
to watch him in the last station of
the night’s study, taking out pad
and pencil to draft more doggerel
for Writing Poetry, haste for
pauper meanings crossed by
thirst for the first Coors of the night
shallowing ten lines to the fastest
gobble of ghost truth. The vesper
indigestible completed in the flourish
of a run-on sentence in the ruin of time.

So the vatic career begins and ends,
tossing Poetry to Party Time like Roman
torches onto the sacred oaks, conquering
the gods by drowning them in pentamter,
this waltzing yoke of crispy smoke.
Here’s to Jethro Tull on the stereo
and liberating that first beer of the night
from the sixpack stashed outside in the
pit of his basement window like
the Dido from her bodice: And sigh
for that first slug of Carthage enough
as “Locomotive Breath” chugs loud,
rough and badboy lour, its grog
sour enough to sop a dying thirst.

Cue The Muse of Missed Chances,
lighting his next Marlboro while he
takes a darker slug, her Bon Voyage
dooming the vatic enterprise
just as it began, slipping from scriptoria
and its harborage like Aeneas
fucked free of Virgil and Dante onto
Bea at last, joyously cutting the big
night wave with every thrusting sigh.

Cry for all of the poets to come
when poetry’s nave is all you can see
fingering Dido’s beery lingerie,
singing off-key to the chorus of
“Cross Eyed Mary.” What embrace
and lament in that Aeneid, a blues
for the latter century, dead Jesus
cranking the archangel volume past 10.

Lord, the trouble I have been, missing
all Your truth fishing for it where
only empties seethe. Wishing wrong.
Listing long and rock snarl ugly abranch
the Fuck Me tree. And yet here I am,
saying just so regretted errancies
and unglued potencies cooked long
in an oeuvre of waste drafts, lifting brow
and eyes and mouth above that tide
plating here those words I wrote so
wrong in my ordaining crazy school.

Shaping crowns & handing scepters to
a ghost’s conception of bespoke rule,
its mantle of graveyards and drowned
coasts draped in empty poet coats.

In Hindu tradition, Truth was the
ultimate cause of Being: To speak
it enabled all to live at their fullest,
finest potential. Irish fili loudly sang
King’s Truth at every coronation,
their voices thicker than Tull’s bricks
& welling deeper torrents than
Emerson, Lake and Palmer could fanfare.

That truthful sound must echo here, even if
I’m an old poet in a dimmed fucked time
where no one reads and old greed
seethes for lack of what the civilized
once seeded and the written word
once tried to sprout. That tangle
of time’s toss-weed I still profess
profanely and devout, the deflowered
knot, truth’s ragged ghost well-spout.

Here’s to the braying organum which
fasts against the gods and keens their count.
May that sound you hear long after
this old fuck mumbled his last at
this desk of dust, numbering falls of
lesser angels on tiny apparencies of truth
which he still stubbornly calls poems:
Dido’s vigorish poured in seaglass couth.

Now it’s your turn to gloze that
fucking youth in your own rear mirror.
Toss the torches as you will, but do
remember whose truth you swilled
and just how it made us all this ill.

March 2026

Submitted to D’Verse Poets Open Link Night #404

What do we know
of truths down under?
Messages from You, Paternost,
are dried by wet thunder
on vellum furthermost.

You sing as You like; it’s we
who shrink the breeched whale
to drink-sized pinky hell,
the rant of things gone stale
knelling vacant the sailed.

Who made death the silencer,
blacking truth with fatal spits?
We’re listening the wrong way,
strung on our dam stakes
praying for darkness to grey.

As you found reciting psalms,
water hists and listens best:
plunging Your head in the weir
woke us to Oran’s aviary,
every thought feathered sidhe,
a-seethe with ghosts caroling.

Mornings I keep raising
these plinths of paper stone
on which runes are written
in some bidden dancing hand.

The sound of hard surf
on soon subsumed sand
prophesizes the loss
of Your precipital land—
that rib and spine stave
which whales the assay.

As Oran is my Christ
so Christ was your Druid:
we’ll write Him both ways.
Bubbles buoy in that fluid
which lofts prayers aweigh.

I will keep your grave fresh
dancing ruins of this day,
wearing the tuion you feathered,
singing Kells with the waves.

April 2021, revised Feb. 2026

Irish Blessings at D’Verse

Note

As legend goes, St. Columba copied a psalter in secret and when he was a young priest in the parish of St. Finian. Finian found out about the copy and demanded it from Columba, but he refused to relinquish it. The case ended up before King Diarmait, who sided with Finian and issued a decree that was probably the first copyright law in a newly literate culture: “To every cow her calf, to every book its copy.” The king’s ruling over the psalter enraged Columba. Crying “As Christ is my Druid!” he took up arms with his kinsmen and fought the forces of King Diarmait in the Battle of Cul Drebne in 561. At day’s end, three thousand were killed or wounded. The day belonged to Columba, but not as a cleric, for he was summarily excommunicated. Due to Ui Neill influence, the church later rescinded that action, but there were two conditions: that Columba leave Ireland forever, and that he bring as many souls to Christ as had been killed at Cul Drebne. He sailed off for Iona, off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides.

“As Christ is my druid” resonates with Columba’s day, where paganism and Christianity co-existed for centuries. I wonder if the present age is similar, where Christian foundations are being slowly replaced by a flowering sentience, so that Oran — the one who was buried so the Iona abbey walls may stand firm — becomes the edifice arising from the ruins of Christianity. An anathemata in the Welsh poet David Jones’ conception, where things turn over into their opposite meaning in the long flow of time.

A blood lid lowers on a full moon far west,
glowering the arc with a heavier mass,
a glutted, drunk and drowning blood feast.
Last night I dreamed my Yesterdays wished me
godspeed – childhood pals and first girlfriends,
college peckerwoods and old bandmates, et
cetera ad nauseum the motleyed of my past.
As their bon voyage faded I crossed over
to the next building on a skyway bridge and
gangplank, utterly open yet clearly a river
with two sides bank to bank. Once across,
I came upon my mother and father who said
I’d be dead soon. Desperate, I told them
that my laptop was sitting on a desk
I hadn’t worked in 40 years, and they could
read my life’s work from a folder they could
find on the upper left of its desktop — all
yours, I told them. Inexpressible futility
shadowed their faces when I remembered
they were dead. Theirs wasn’t a farewell
from my past but a stilled and chill welcome
to the barrow where nothing more is done.
I realized how little time was left to finish
all my business but the measure was moony
— was it days or milliseconds before that
final midnight chime from which no traveler
ever echoes a return? And where was my wife
and neighbors, folks from my AA meetings,
our cats, all that living loving legerdemain?
Panic poured icewater and I woke, 1:30 am,
the bedroom shade black in the middle
and pale all around, full moonlight’s hymnal
singing its lines. Bood time acumen,
already filled, the passageway Oran’s
and yet mine still to distill this short time.
Blood moon setting: My work becomes yours,
sooner than I care in the forever of shores.
A volume reddening with severed rhyme.

March 2026

Even when things are sweetly vernal
ours is a lonely land, what’s present
and blooming looming too with
the absent’s emptying low tide.
The young oak in the front yard
has dropped its leaves and budded out,
its shade grown wider for petunias
we planted round its trunk. A vital
figure on the fruiting plain, but
surging from a spring whose source
is cankered with the cancelled out.
Polluted with beholden things
taken long ago by the devout.
That’s the trouble with sacred landscapes
raised within: Pilgrimage is a coffin road
when the journey and its destination
are lonely cairns. They tend to blur
the rapture of warm and breezy days
in their stilled nigh frozen poise,
nigh immortal as my yesterdays.
Maybe there’s a candle for that,
a frail flicker’s contra in the poetry.
You know it’s spring there too
on the sacred isle in my heart,
an everliving augment for the
heather and bog asphodel
bestride the fallen stones and
chapel ruins which undulate
vast graveyards of the dead.
Purely present too – awake and
scything harvests when I sleep.
My mother and father greet me
at the door beneath the hill.
Back together and in love, with
my two brothers at their side.
Waving me in. Handing my ghost
a glass of water freshest from
the well which rises graves to glory.
The draught of it so springlike,
so vanishingly quelled. Candle that
if you can: A happiness growing
two worlds embracing all it vales.
Two sheets for the starlit journey
which begins and ends unveiled.
And if you believe all that, I have
a bridge in Lonelyland for sale;
I’ll throw in some lowtide candles,
flickerworks for lonely trails.

March 2026

Submitted to D’Verse Open Link Night #403

Note

A late contribution to Dora’s “Embodying a Landscape” challenge from this past Tuesday and with an accidental nod to Sanaa’s “low tide” mini-challenge, which somehow found its way into the poem before I read it.

In the old lit, a king spent All Hallows Eve     
on the mound with the lord of the sidhe,
learning where lost treasures were bound
& hearing old stories of that sacred ground.
Come Christian time, saints raised heroes
from the dead to speak of ancient things
offering baptism from wells and a Heaven.
Lifting old tales from the cairns and court tombs
for the scribes to write in lines of gold leaven.
Who knew the encounter of these traditions
would light two fires from one feathered quill,
flinting mouth-music on vellum while willing
the mind’s eye into things familiar yet strange.
Lamping a sidhe under and behind every page,
a liminal vale swarming with faery archange.
Lit proved more potent than the high gates
it once loudly proclaimed — more durable too.
Tucking the Newgrange riddle in the tender
of that choo-choo skytrain. Took fifteen
centuries to shovel it entire in the firebox
but how that kah-blooey now downward rains!
Now we get the shatter of Oran’s grave shout,
lit that can’t matter churching the sky’s rout.
Uncowling Patrick to peer in Crom’s snout
to spy odysseys deepwrit on ocean veneer.
Lit is the goddess whose shade sings that pier.

February 2026

Submitted to D’Verse Poets Open Link Night

If the God ceases to be the way of
the zenith, he must fall secretly.

— Liber Novus

Not writing many poems these days
because its precinct is so spare:
the unread medium of turning’s gaze,
a breath of fatal noctal urning air.

Shadows are all that’s left to mine
when verses write illegible,
when dreams are unintelligible
and digs in dirt too sepulchral
for the sufficient’s fallow court.

Skeletal of culture, faith & brain
I grow elemental on the stem
of rootbound shadow, a canopy
of lost truths pilloring the dust
of holy pallors. It sure makes

for narrow reading, the blander
simile in unheated tombs,
rooms molting the drag hotel
of turning’s dim queen.
Her As If not labial nor labile
or much labeled anymore
but shines verses barrowing
the sublime sound love once made
harrowing art with its truth.

The old ghost bedsprings creak
ghost Yahweh’s rheumy freight,
commanding too much, demanding
& damning all it nadirs to more’s
punchdrunk, basalt, dimming score.

When a literal godhood fails,
the littoral clitoral becomes
its insufficient jail, a clatter-masque
of nails board-scraping what once
seemed bullion — mythos-real.

No wonder I now dream of aliens
in libraries bowling metal balls of
lurid doom. Absence is the rhetoric
of the cathedrally-emptied room
where I fail writing poems:  

I still blight that feckless tomb,
the echo of epitaphs where the
dust of darkness had once bloomed.
Who needs hocus in writ focus
when the given note is spume,
wavechant spectrally strewn?

February 2026

Hello Kay, I hope I haven’t disturbed you
in the low caul of the ages, dead now perhaps
or simply gone from all reference in the tides
of living time. Long time no speak — not
since that September night in 1981 when
you tore from my car and walked back into
the house where you lived with your sister.
Not looking back, leaving me to this ever without,
at once and hence the severed man. I don’t
even have a picture of you, just blood inked
in journals which later poems traced the barest
contours of, trying to recall the insides of falling
in and out of drunkfuck love. The wild grief
and sour oblivion which followed your walk
out of my life I always blamed on you
so I never thought to make amends
which now seem necessary to the dead.

Sorry. It isn’t the same shame
of keeping buried bad night friends
who disturbed the marital peace. And for
that it’s worse, pointing the finger
of fateful blame so steadily at your ghost
like a willfulness ossified to stone
because everything that felt reborn
merging with you suddenly groaned
an abyss where you turned away.

And O the dreadful gears of resentment
that soon plowed my days and nights,
against you and Real Love Herself,
me hound-howling and bitch-pounding
while glubbing unmerciful fifths
drowning our ghost tryst. A supple
steely motion I’ve embraced and traced
now for years, down to this very morning
trying to make such late amends to
remembered summer moonlit airs
while my wife of 30 years sleeps upstairs.

Your echoing in that translucence sobered
eventually into me trying to stop mistaking
literal conductions for Salome’s verse
jive, seamstress of dreams and abductor
of your file from my heart-vault to finally
process and recess in this dark and murkier
self-truth-berserk latter-amends style .

But I digress — sorry. For decades now
I’ve done this sort of talking to the wall
of colossal fuckups of my fate erected
and put you on the far side of, a condition
I can’t stop thinking you might hearken
if I just said a few things rightfully
if self-frightfully fucking true.

For whatever confoundings of your own
tale which leapt so momentarily into
mine — four abortions with your previous
boyfriend, your hopes cracked and greatly
blooded mistaking my drunken aura for
the true beguine — Falling in love, I gave
you clout of a goddess crossed by wiles
of the snake, all the shit I yearned and feared
ramped toward an infinity which could never
be invested in any real woman’s 1981.
For all that mythic monstrance I millstoned
our brief encounter with, I am truly sorry,
for everyone else I hurt lugging the
unforgiven freight of your ghost name.

Those fleet six weeks might surely have
taken root and even blossomed into time
had they not been so scoured and soured
by the collapsing sense of my failure at
understanding just who you were and
could never be. God how infinite the rays
of that August sun at Cocoa Beach, rising
just behind your regnant silhouette and
you smiling so deeply, long and
sweetly fucked all the night before:
Your imago right then branded my heart’s
zenith as if atop summer’s true Everest,
the purest rebirth with no further
height mortal lovers can go. How foolish
I was to worship our three-night grail
of fucking at such dazzling cliff-heights!
How grateful I should have been for
what I learned about heights with
the subsequent barrel-fall back into
one’s finite lonely self, nursing all
that grief with endless boozing!

And why should I blame you for all I
subsequently broke those sodden years
so determined to chain your ghost
to a falling, failed despair? While
you delved so briefly in me and (I assume)
became free. Well, like they say,
resentment is drinking poison wishing
someone else would die. A long life’s
interim has passed — what, 44 years?
I like to think you settled down to find
what made you happy, that you
finally brought a child or three to birth
and raised them long enough to
become the grandmother of hope by now.

For whatever blame I bid you heap on
your mirror and might kept you thirsty,
heartsore or drearier —sorry. I know
face-to-ghost amends can only go
a certain distance healing hearts
either living or dead with latter truth,
but it’s all I can offer in this poem,
standing apart from all the others
brained, pulped and/or eviscerate
in your name. I set all those down,
take off this mask and hold my naked
heart up to this wailing wall’s to say:

Sorry I didn’t add up to the man you
so dreamed I was at first, whoever
he might have been. How far I
drifted from him in your gaze
and ears, bent over you sweaty
and defensive, raving much I needed
you — pleading nigh insane.
Your eyes behind dark sunglasses,
already seeing tomorrows
with me happily unendured.

In lieu of more direct amends
here are the one I made to the living
with all my sins with you in mind.
I believe I’m closer now to the man
you rejected me for hoping some
better love might have spanned
my broken bridge’s imago.

I don’t wear Speedos to the beach
and stopped requesting Journey
from DJ Death’s bone choir.

I don’t yearn from all ends wishing
to torch love and then pour that
yearning like a booze on fuming pyres.

I got a vasectomy —  no more
inseminate errors to terror
the bedded soire terroir!

And grief of losing you has taught
me magnitude and beauty and
a chance to work for better things.

I sobered up and got married —
twice — this time for 30 years
of a real woman humbling
me and keeping me on sure ground.

Buried my mother and father,
two brothers, two nephews,
a cousin, three AA sponsees
and so many cats learning
what salt serves in tears.

And of that serpent sexuality
who feasted so wildly upon us
all I can say is that she and I abide
and remember you with neither
pride nor shame — cliffs of touch
I never need bleed again.

All that from your not turning
around, bidding me envowel
this ghostly garden sound!

What Thou I so mistook in you
has slowly made me understand
that we were fierce but temporary
puppets romancing grails furthest
inside, our touch electrifying
ghostly ingots buried before
we were born, lifting with a kiss
shadowy gildings of the tide,
dolphin laments I here ride
no woman’s love presides.

I’m still rowing I to Thou but
the promised island’s my own
and the only place where any
God’s temple may be found
and Oran peeps underground.

And from all that, this: I’ve learned
that happiness isn’t getting what
I wanted so in you but wanting
what I found after you turned.

So, shade: Is there anything else
you’d add to the ways I hurt you
blundering badly in that distant age?
And how is it, my brightest of night
friends, still simmering penumbral rage,
you might yet be fully repaid?

I shuddup with ear to stone
and listen: Come with your ban
sidhe creel of wounded tales.
Croon to me your widow’s song.
Moon this shadow garden tomb.

Evolution of Love at D’Verse