.cliffhanget
If you turn the
delusion into a story do
we disappear
The question
with its pet
tragedy crying
in the deep
structure of the night
Where do you
imagine it came from
Paradise in decay
after the most predicated
sweetness
Every
language became
antique at once
and pristine
You are in hell
there are opportunities
said the nice person
I need to be interrupted
by another logic
the birds of my dry
childhood
I thought of a cloudy
opal that only
gets smaller
and what it showed me
Terrarium for a tiny sky
Certain Stains
What you delight in
you become
and it becomes
your true property
What the desolate blood says
you say to me
trustee of the free night
the one that hides its burning face
Don’t be stingy
Think about the rain
a blue foot path
and winding music
the November wind
that waits for you
with your terror
and your amnesty
in the nameless cities
you’ve lived in all your life
I don’t believe in your remediation
I interrogate my eclipses with my bare hands
Out of the labyrinths of language and faith
That’s your name
your faces made cadaverous
by hospital fluorescents
and the music of your voices
drowned in the white noise of invisible crimes
I carry some of your beauty with me
in my hatred and my shame
Every one of you
truer more ruthless and more sublime
but I survived
antinomian completely naked and destroyed
with their danger
and their breeding innocence
The high desert with its fragrance
meditates for me
I follow the silence home
Lightning entangled with lightning and the night
That immaculate traveler and stranger
a lachrymose intangible hive
remembering everything we disavow
keeping it alive for us
Loralie Falling in Love with Her Own Consciousness
I like to see you
when you’re thinking
enveloped in your lonely
subterranean aroma
that makes me remember being lost
and unafraid
buried to the shoulders in a snowbank
in the boreal night
half animal and half child
Your experience exists
at a distance from you
swimming
like an image in a mirror
You look so great
and sad in your pajamas
it makes me want to quit my job
No one can understand my happiness
when I see you confined
with your life
a stranger with no language
who walks behind you
and hides her face
Fullness
The promise of a new cartoon relationship
with the phenomena, better
neural networks filled with empty windows
and an atmosphere of ineffable disappointment
There was a mirror that whispered and a mirror
that dreamed
An archetype quintessential as a sparrow's skull
filled with a girl's voice singing
a child with a suitcase filled with leaves
The Ultrarussian
Giant tilted neon sign:
Complete Destruction in blue
The numbers imagined you and
you appeared
I was a blind convict and your face
under my hands was psalms in the
total dark so I swam inside you
like god
wired into a transpersonal
intelligence and its ghost stories vast
and brightening as the sky
The unknown and unrewarded
reverberate permanently
in the murder kitchen
The masked
and ghostly
shy glass legs draped
heaven or hell
phantom haiku
over the edge of the sofa
of unnameable hue
Richard Cronshey is the author of several books of poetry. He lives in the desert west.