The Spinal Tap

Usually, it arrives late: the epiphany

Just after I’ve slain a horde of deadwood, met

A dozen dead ends

And nibbled the noon dust, it comes

Fashionably late and hopelessly futile.

Its face the insipid face
Of my defeat.

Often it kisses me
But only after I’ve dug deep into the mire
And traded my soul with the pebbles

I now toy in my hand and mind.
I am all mouth, all fingers,

All flesh, as it unravels

Unexpectedly

Like some rare oxymoron

Jutting out a bald field of prose.

How can beauty, unfolding, be unjust

And useless? A gift that arrives too late?
A fatal after-thought, a coup-de-grace
Straddling its own casket.

Sometimes, it teases me: salvation
That bears the fate of Sisyphus.

And others:

Van Gogh, Plath, Nietszche, Christ—

Pawns to the reckoning that came too late.

(published in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, June 22, 2003)

Within the lungs’ core, the last gasp

Is plucked; the eyeballs’ frenzied stare,

The minute, fevered breath that stains

The aroma of an otherwise piquant

Soup, is monument of trauma
While the thickening froth furthers its death

This fly

Is me in a day of lethargy.

Shoot to the black, this mind

Is free but wanting—serve

And feed my narcissism whose source
Of fancy fathers my guilt:

I find the Muse fugitive

And absent when the moon is such—

Stagnant thoughts lump my brain
While the soup mocks the insect’s final dance

This fly
Is me in a day of lethargy.

(Published in the PEN & INK, 1999)