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I am simply a man

A man cast into existence

Allocating the lasting vestiges from my first fervor

Balancing on a fragment of consciousness

With oracles in my eyes

Thoughts wheeling around the false apparatus

A man who knows only a little

My mind wishes to believe

I know the secret answers

About how life works in people

Turns people into others

Large huddled stones

 In a circle on sand near the fringe of foam

Massive grey dense objects

Like praying sea lions upright on the beach

Wet from the sky’s transmissions

Over centuries of wind carving smoothness

Full of succinct energy from time

I wish to experience and exist

And be those praying rocks immune to time

Where prayer loosens its hold on the corpuscles

To watch fermented anger escape into vapor

Receptive to weather’s dreams of ebony night

To feel the body blows of life

The crashing surf against my best-laid plans

I once had an idea

It was mine so it was true

That all life is a lucky gift

Sunflowers and pastel skies

Breathing out

Only polished stones

Skimming the serrated waves

Then I became sad or bored

With only happy endings

And smiles for no reason

I dreamed that the turnstile I entered

Changed me internally irreversibly

Then easy crosses swords with Desire

Renegades hunt down success

And show me the dark opening in the horizon

Where security freezes on the black ice

Poised for the perfect ambush

Plans are lost to me

The moment never cares for fear’s fantasies

Ambition found the crooked path

Suffering saved me from success

I sold my possessions for a dime-store novel

Totemic goals were slotted into my mind

Idols displayed on me yet not mine

Spirit from another ether

Volume after the book’s edge

Aligned and congruent in the love affair

With the entity that was myself

Like a skyscraper clutching its windows

Sequins from distance

Striving for the sake of striving

Adding beats to the pulse

I loved my unconscious self

Hostile fronts with a silk center

A frontrunner in the rat-race

All-consumed by the fire-island

Realizing the brevity of fame

Hope held aloft by

Inflated reputations

Sinews hooked to the sky

Verses stained by blackened blood

 Moonlight kissed

Feasting on scarce answers

Faith in only the concrete

When a man can say God is dead

He breathes in an exhausted will

Then the alien host departs

Replaced by what is not me

Totems crushed to smithereens

Turned to a confetti

That feeds a desire for genuine spirit

A transmigration and a new pair of eyes