Specter

There are a lot of things

The dead can’t do

But they can sleep at a depth

Unattainable in life.

How infinite their dreams

Those black filaments

Unwrapped stamens

Bleeding nectarious specters.

I am one of those who

Draws lines and clings

To the same nooks

To the very same crannies

Each day wheezing

Unalterable in proximity.

 

You dare ask for my secrets

They are my bones, my cells

I cannot part with them

Anymore than an oyster

Can recover from entry

These secrets which eat

Their way deeply

Into my marrow

Those cannibals

Which are greater

Even than the exchange

Of all my organs.

 

The earth maintains

Its orbit whether

Or not I am there

And I sit in the spaces

Where it has been

Where it will be

Only alighting

When it occupies

My precise coordinates

I do not care

For loneliness

But I will wait it out.

 

I have no planet

I sit in the dark

In the vacuum

Fetal and necrotic

Perhaps I am right

But better for you

That I am not

Because if I am

Then we are built

And disassembled

From identical notions.

Photo Challenge #5 “Paper Train”

Dheny Patungka

A glass cephalic muse

Yields to disclosure

She knows as I know not

She speaks as I cannot

Of a life so curiously quarried

I am wealthy she tells me

Red as a pagan heart

 

Volumes of unwritten poems

Fill my carts, at least in theory,

Though having never seen them

I cannot attest a life-giving labor

Too oft stillborn I am not convinced

That I possess a reasonable womb

Death I fear you, as my only companion

That I should speak forever as I was