you've seen how i bandy big words
around with such bravado.  i only do it to amuse you--
in real life i am unpretentious, a word too brief
for such a long bedtime story.
my knowledge is a broken guess,
my voice a syllabary on a series of scrolls
where practice makes a lineage of error.

my eyes seem to beckon dusk but you are
never close enough to see my eyes before
the dark descends. my heart beats an aggravating
tympanum of the gods.. so what, then, is this poem? for those
who drink, a book with torn pages; for those
who don't, a glass half full of whiskey,
crumbs of eaten sound, a single tooth, a lonely tongue,

a proscenium arch, an empty stage, a rickety apron,
a list of no dimensions--a study
of the knower, the known, and the knowing
as yet unknown, a kite's string unspooling,
punctuation with no words.

is this making any sense to you?
i meant to say :  the autumn sun
touches the horizon of love's remembered past
so late that i cannot cry nor sing in this
unspoken hour with the wind twisting toward the sky
as from your heart the stone of love describes a trajectory--
the long path of suffering, the vision and the dead star--

its light locking memory