The night stars and the California current, waves crashing and receding across beaches of crushed shells, a bent,
shattered tree line of firs where low mist coils and evaporates, the quick airy salt shimmers, grunts and rooting snouts,
Whippoorwills, crows and ravens knife the hour at odd intervals as if compelled by the relative dark, the coruscating
rhythmic tides…
 
This is the elemental palace where we have come, you and I, to excise from despair our lupine-coiled hope and the oratorio
concealed within it…  the temporal nomenclature discarded, violin cello glissandos scoring the yellow quivering scud,
gutted velocity speckled with infant lips, and from the more distant bald hilltops where feu-follets rise from sulfur sink holes
cloudy white gray pachyderms plume and vanish…  nature is its own costume here, corporeal numbers of bled stubble…
an anti-hero with a cow lick, shoes, no socks… your comb the sand washes… one opaque eye, one green eye, slowly
spins about the last nurse anvil who has stood on one leg for six long years and now, in ricochet ash, paints her face with
dimples…  I hear the music that echoes in your heart, profane tailspins over gleaming cities 250 years from now, as if we
aren’t whom we know, as if, with trickster anarchs, we begin the dance, Bird of Prey, suddenly alone, the green tubular
phantom etches our portrait into threshers and horse thieves…
 
The fourteenth syllable on the fourteenth of the month for Nocturne 14 is volcanic,  crucible… alchemic arithmetic, terrestrial
and Venusian chloride, minced Madagascar on toast… “Capitulate,” you whisper…  “We are nothing, nowhere”…  Your
victims are mine, your triumphs…
 
Waves crush the sloping sand that breathes and bubbles, sinks and merges in this aeonic compendia of listing masks toppled
with lead leaves… this alphabet cozened from brimming mirrors that emerge from the whitecaps, glisten and sink back into
opacity…
 
I once thought that if you told me your name, all this would effloresce and we would float across emotional minefields, free and
clean, happy that we could find each other without the usual dismissive circumflex, the endless finality in a
smile erased, the amputee victim happy that he had lost a limb and survived…
 
I once thought that silence would salve unforgiven disasters between two stumbling shadows crowned with lightning bugs in
July, desperate flickers of lust and honey in the long breezy grass…
 
Quiet now. Listen. The street corners are rubbing their yellow fingertips together and someone somewhere snores himself
to sleep…
 
Listen to the low bass pulsations of the noctambule wind that rises up over the towers and sifts through the cracks in the walls
where we sleep under moonlit suns…