some poems from last quarter.

mycology

why so glum, young button?

glad should you go, glabrous and

free

dark sweet beginnings found you

doming perfect

above the loam

small crescentric moon in its second phase,

filiform up-fumbling, adpressed for words—

the layer of emergence is a thousand yards away but,

veiled,

your fruiting body is gibbous and

waxing fat.

woolgatherer

i once dreamt

of a blue path i walked down.

it was cerulean and the sky dark cornflower.

blue-tinged flowerets encircled soft blue path-dirt.

i did not stray and between one moment and another moment,

a gust huffed and a violent cloud of blushing lotus blossoms

rushed at me from a strange tree and i was the eye of a lovely vorticle—

and i heard my mother’s name uttered from the stamens, thick with pollen.

these lilies thrive in scum and i wondered at their conception.

i sometimes remember

that, once, life seemed a dream,

and the discovery of small suck-toed frogs—

vibrant and newly-unfurled-green and startlesome when they croaked in your hand—

beneath sweet peas and the leafs of wet roses and the sweet muck of a creek

was better than anything.

and i haven’t seen a frog since i killed one out of love when i was seven,

or if you count the dream where hundreds of all creeds stampeded my porch

warning me from hatred, though they owed me naught.

i once awoke to a tangible sough in my ear—

“I am come”—

and as a soldier at attention for his superior, so i briskly roused.

the room, dim, empty, sparking with existence, smoothed my fidelious hackles,

and no tremors shook me;

i embraced the discarnate call.

and though each cycle i tremblingly await further incorporeal instructions,

little has been dreamt since, for in the dreamworld time is not linear but lenitive,

and chronology but a choice.

cryptogram

within the worn-down corners of my mind,

i can feel things begin to sprout, to grow.

curling ‘round the epic words, betwined;

behind mine eyes, a look i’ll never show.

the world around me manifests itself;

roots in my core, i cannot fathom why

each tendril winds about the bony shelf—

inside, the change is urging me to try.

while all look on, upon me, gazing through,

the leaves are crowding me with “hows” and “shoulds”.

none mightn’t never know what i once knew:

that with dear time, a prescience of “could.”

if, in a plot of ground, i might transplant

this thriving fret: i would, i should, i can’t.