Firmament V
by S. L. V. Stronwin
A cleansing black smoke
That’s what I need once in a while
The old painted train seems only to burnish by
When it might penetrate the rain
Simple spells and autism
Nearest now, but still off in the hidden
Little world of trees now abandoned
To our pretense of progress
Remember the swarm?
Slow black and ticking in the snow
Smoking dope and campfire food
Not quite real, either of them
But you captured it all, disassembled, reassembled
In color
I like the ache—it feels
Like you did something, you know?
Wound
Not corpselike, just full
She shows
Incorruptible as ice in the flower hole
Exposition of snowy visions is a surer course
And the undead try
—Don’t give way to nostalgia
Try not to let her in
Mortar and pestle to grind the arils
Shatter the fruit to end life
Pliable then, next unoiled
Only to disintegrate in closure
Paranoia in the woods
White stalks
And monkshood to end it all
A shame not to dream of it
Zen as a purring kitten
Zen is a purring kitten
Wife dreaming up salmon for her son
All made tired by the light
Never at peace, though now we think
Love is an ease
Love is an ease
Anisocoria
Pillars of light
In forged spirals
Fear of fire
Star anise pine
Cold symphony
And iron apertures
Steel lens tethered
To grey clusters in rope
Sight of blindness
Withered cables
Ragged yellow
Nerves in acid
Palsy in four
Waiting for light to pierce
To flutter in
Taking no time at all
From its fast pace
A perspective
In bent bright shapes
Small perfect shapes
Or great green spheres
Or pale blue dots of dust
Humming in time
Counting cold cosmic clocks
But all too deep
Too strange, distant
Ineffable
Black silences
Instead, close light
Something near and massless
Generated
But not generating
–
Now sight withers
And parasitizes
And reaches in
Pulling out cold wet lymph
White and wilting
In grey iron
Unforgiving
Cold carbon mouth
Dripping steel flesh
Uncorroded by breath
Razor wire
Connects the lip and breast
Now so inside
Eyeskin drips wet and weak
The eye ripples
Pineal weakness shines
Blossoming and
Whispering and
Absorbing self
Corrugating
Senses and words
Rationalizing loss
Killing meaning
Devouring intent
Forgetfulness
Consumes me so
I wish I felt
Something, anything
Blind now, afraid
Her light stolen from me
Sleeping virus
Crafts a womb from your thoughts
Composes flesh
Strung in vellum
Makes love to you
Through you, inside
Uses you as
The stars use an ocean
Silent and soft
There she sings cold melody
Her insignificant borders
There he hums base harmony
Dissonance in replication
Happiness inverse
Happiness in verse
–
Holes change their shape
Welcoming light
In dead harbors
Lapping old shores
Glimpsed briefly through the fog
Forgotten all her faces
–
Again, attacking
Strewn like orchards
In summered ecstasy
Hedonists not idle
Celebrants that sup
Borrow
And steal
Now divide
Share the wealth of this corpse
Homunculus of littler universes
And windblown fragments
Elsewise whole
Or in an illusion of wholeness
Third departure
Halation emulsified
In the yellow fat of fear
Storm cellared echoes
Subsume the distance
Manipulate with terrible force
–
Orchids in her eyes
Orchids in her smile
Cincinnatus
His war thus ended
Disrobes and returns
Embraces the earth
Nerves compressed
Lesions in legion
Variance in photographs
Ancient brain succumbs
To error, helminthic corruptors
Or great distress
O, happy windows
Powerful organs
You emulate the world you imagine
Furnish meaning
Feeding obsession, mistrust
Part of a whole
But an effable selection
Or at least at a glance
Legions in lesion
Galaxies pregnant with light
Spilling life into the saltless sea
Overfull and ever-flowing
BIO
S. L. V. Stronwin was born in Upstate New York, but has been itinerant for some time, finding home in the Central Coast of California, the Central Valley of the same, Baja Arizona, the far woods of Vermont, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. At present, the author writes what he reads: subversive high fantasy, eldritch weird fiction, scientific nonfiction, and stuff about plants. He has one cat, a genteel and tuxedo-bound fellow named Sokka. His work can be found at (amazon.com/author/slvs) – the author’s work, that is, not the cat’s.
