December starts with a poem

Ironic Ellipses  in Four Uneven Sonnets

We can no longer read the eroded runes of time

 in ruins, not even when we scratch away the muck

of centuries, the lines like relics of the slime

that putrescent creatures leave when they are stuck,

no longer able to follow simple instincts. The crime

of history stamps us too as far too ignorant,

infatuated and flattered with our lack of luck,

as though each broken speculation could paint

our hopes with doubt, what you call sublime,

mere pismires waggling antennae in the muck,

such is our music, dance and thought on time.

Marks the slater leaves beneath the concrete grave

are hieroglyphs and ciphers of eternity

and thus we dream of pristine knowledge, sage

admonitions of the first parent to go on bended knee,

we must obey and imitate the mindless slave

who endowed his fears in that dark and primal age.

Under-rock creatures scurrying in darkness rave

In silence about cycles of dance, as though the page

Of epic poetry were in their rutted path,

Homeric parodies sleeping for eternity,

And choreographed monstrosities who laugh

At those doomed to daylight and dreams, who see

Nothing in their gloom but truth and ecstasy.

My words are the words birds of paradise drop

As they fly from tree to tree, life and lies,

Or the saltless tears that roll down from a peacock’s eyes,

My sentences the pellets of bunnies who no longer hop.

There are monkeys of madness and apes of delusion,

And silver-backed creatures who howl through the night,

And yet when the sky explodes on the mountain, the sun

Stays hidden in a fantailed stutter; so try as I might,

There are no soft thoughts to comfort the reader, but blight

All ambitions and stifle great ideas, to run

From verse to verse with felicitous implication.

Heart beats unevenly thud in the mud of existence,

Lungs wheeze and whistle in a chorus primeval, and breath

Drips thickly into the atmosphere, from whence

The very idea of joyfulness falls to its death,

Sucked into the swamp, like a will-o-wisp’s abhorrent stench.

Orblutes reflect and refract the melodious dawn,

Crestfallen caterpillars creeping into metamorphoses

That have no sense of direction, conversions drawn

Beyond all natural limits into endless Sargasso Seas,

Lost in a Bermuda Triangle of self-delusions,

Permitted errors and sanguine snatches of catachresis:

Thus the end of poetry and prosaically fading suns.