If like the scorpion

Gagging the sun

He remembered nothing     that there is nothing

conceived by a challenge to transcend

the clade where words return upon returning

I place a sapling of noxia to the sea and I name it the Star

 

 

Crossroads

 

The sun is round because round is

the land where wings break

 

 

They think they have returned to tamer colors

the flat bones splattered with nothingness, adrenaline and
percussive pause, in tumult up

through the rays and fanned into bleakness by life, a kestrel screamed
once; a catalepsy reincensed that scream with its cellophane sheen

until now, fraught low in the tizzy, they
dutifully die

and there are nower pomades then for sweetened dreaming

 

 

Let’s do it this way

Let’s carve the lime sap into the black stone of a skull

Let’s give the voice of the master to a deaf instrument

 

 

How spitting unto clarity is the true call of speech

And what, in this siren hour, that turns the nape of my neck

to preclude both God and the self-affirmation of my desire

Is a mother wrapping itself in opal hair

such a huge sum of disorderly fleets that no land could harbor

when the stone lost its voice

 

 

I want to sing but I am not a soprano

 

 

Let this opus bray lustily, that my flow of time be
underflung by the jetsam of broken hearts

Or fine skinks that dangle

in the livid tints of dead kelp

 

 

Where there is no Suchness, there is a knowing against itself

divorce, where art thou

pushing off the skin of poinsettia

Do you really want the chimera of vision to send me candy cigarettes

gush milk from the macula of sunset’s iris?

 

 

The flower’s defiance is involuntary

 

 

But is it nature that gifts us with beauty or am I forcing

myself to bloom automatically as you say

yes

there is beauty in nature and then there is only my love for it

disorienting like an overturned car

breathing out its liquid end

 

Desire is everything it is not

For who made the joke is dead by the cemetery drip

for blithering joy and then to slither back

is a pleasance overshadowed by fleabane

I say wait. Wait for a decapitation by rainbow, wait for

one of these days of continuous flux in which death is sometimes

a flower of its own.

 

 

Is it jealousy that vies in me a kiss from it?

Perhaps this ant-haunted stucco needs our vacant gaze

I need it to be shaped by the hand of nature, a
sudden riot of yellows and greens as you prepare to snuff

smooth the crust of my dry lips to lift that maggot of a mask

 

 

The eye disfigures the body with what it is never made to see

Venn diagrams of the subjective and the objective, of analytical logic,
tend to border over a valley

It tells me

that my wilting self is more important

than the tyranny of generative word-structures

That

this facsimile has triggered infinite selves inside
the fluorescent grip of quarantine

 

 

Such smoke and patchouli burns

there’s no nourishment for words that are gaily eaten

When the geode is your puke

we will fuck forever

thy silence allows me

to drop this tarantula

testicle rococo on my faux silk throne

 

 

And you now know the windowless road of young love

the liquid facades and stagnant moldings and overloaded bay windows

the cobwebs sprouting cheetah teeth

You know it was love after all that made us go blind

or perhaps the high walls of the prison

it was night watchmen with skirts whiter than the moon

camouflaged in the sanguine soil

 

 

Since I am the star of birth I

will give birth to the purest flower of language

sting my tongue at the cauliflower coursing

on a teal anus of leafy neem

 

 

You weren’t there and neither was the prophet
But I hear   The radio sends its

peals of swan musick, not to line the bottoms of my golden grudges

Like the snot of jacaranda petals in these days where love is not God

It’s the cold shiver of the quincunx

that pleases my soft fat flamewalls, strung like linens in the wind

 

He knows nothing

amazing these nomads who walk like the scorpion

I taste scorpion juice in my mouth

My act has nothing in common with the contemplation of these
forgotten frames

But I have but thy word and the lash for sustenance

 

 

Let it go

let it go to the feather of night

Let your death not feel the white band of the boat that carries us back

 

 

We share these worlds

not because we are killed or live

or because we can speak

but because

 

 

You are like a diamond cut into the shape of a sky

And that is the truth and that is enough

And I can not find the words to say

Just say your death is impossible

and your death is impossible.

 

 

 

 

Evan Isoline is a writer and artist living on the Oregon coast. He is the author of PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY (forthcoming from 11:11 Press) and the founder/editor of a literary project called SELFFUCK. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming at 3:AM Magazine, Full-Stop, Always Crashing, Surfaces.cx, Witchcraft Mag, and more. Find him @evan_isoline.