.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

 

photo: Andrew Haley

Richard Cronshey is the author of several books of poetry. He lives in the desert west.