San Pablo

Written by C. KoeppArtwork  "The Devil is in The Cherry" by Raja Timihiri.16 inches x 20 inches, Acrylic and Collage on paper May This heat is not your own. It must be flawedAs remnant of the second breath of God;The hand against your skin seeks secule blissTo softly realize its genesisInside the slow regrowth of paradise –Your lungs of virtue and my core of vice.From bone we blossom, flowering in blood,Unveined with what will soon become a floodAnd you, my love, are halfway through the earth,Your eyelids closed. The throe from death to birthWill trickle from your fell like water, andDismiss itself into the gritting sand.      June Now you sleep in my bed. Your lips will touchThe hollow of my ear, and then with suchA grace, deliberation, ardentlyApply a perfect pressure, and gentlyAllow my clarity that which it sought:Your hands were thoughtless, and your eyes were not.The plane inside your mouth would manifestA volume in which laws would go unguessedAs ice and vapor, cosmic dust, relictTo shock the senses with the imperfectOcclusion as it passed, or (now) comes toIn rhythm of your pulse. Love won’t save you.      July Do you go up? Adonis, humbly tiedWith prefixes seen fit as I derideThem from the shading of your fading mouthApplied by slipping hand a fraction south!What shifts upon the shoulders that I carvedFrom marble where the lonely mad have starved?The songs that boil in my teeth accrueBut I will not release the sound for you.And I did wait. The local flora rotInside the bulge of spacetime that I boughtFrom velvet of the nation of your eyes.The color cannot breathe between, and dies.      August Here we have always been: in the long trystOf summer dead-night, in latest August.The stairs I ascended alone. To youI ascended alone. The sense of trueSummit blushed and faded. And you were there:You had never been so naked. Somewhere,Blue hair in blood and heat. The gravityOf blue hells and blue heaven’s pravityBroken us into the first beast: inside,Your seraphity divine purifiedOur marriage bed. How I had loved you then.And how I do love you now and again.      September And how do you perceive the solar winds?Was there a nerve buried in the weekendsIn heaven spent (perhaps even your own)That burned and blazes still when you’re alone?The truth: one thousand monochrome days passedWithout you. Tens of that formed the contrast.You lower me. It is a state, to beSeparate, then, from a twin reality.I lived behind the line. I died behindThe line, knowing the godforsaken grindThat I could have had you the first way: youCould have really been mine. And I, yours, too.     October I will have loved you – did, promise, declawThe primal dig to dislocate one’s jawTo comprehend, at once, its victim inEntirety. The pleasure and the sinDerived and sown in animalityWould be silenced by practicality,Or smothered in its sleep. So I had beenIn tight control of close decision whenThe mushroom clouds blossomed miles awayAnd dove-snakes could not trip a word to prayAnd symbols of the end danced naked, loud;I was here with my signs of nothing, proud.      November Back then, twin gods, diaphanously done,Had long forgotten how to own someone.Listen: the syrinx melts within my throatAnd sticks, for no mere pressure could devoteA captive sun to flicker, swoon, and fadeAround my sternum core’s specific shade.The last morning – I trust that you recallThe white light, and the blood that had to fallBetween your cusp and mine. And then, almostAgain, a kiss on the forehead: the mostViolent death imaginable alone.And you . . . this elegy is not your own.      December I suffer from canyon-edge echo andFaded delirium. This is new landOf penny wishes. I am blind. Your ghostIs dead. It is not so deep and, almost,Not so early. Please, there are is a thunderOf you for easy drowning. I wonderWhy, at night, a still-warm ashen flake ofSomething landed on my heart. It was love.I melted and I watched it dissever.Schiller goes and forgets you forever;It does not matter who you were and areBecause you know that she still bears the scar.      January Does it mean anything? You’ll sleep tonightAnd not wonder if what I’ve worded’s right.A last hymn, then, only to understandA final tour of my dying dreamland:Soft cracks in the earth. Cream and naked wire –Morning pine, the birth of riverbank fire –Another black drive home, a wrenching sob –Dull salt, pink curve and penultimate throb –Warm midnight vinyl hum of sacred space –Our hands rise, touch, fall to our matching pace –Sudden waves of domestic tenderness –The ticking clock, undying reminisce –      February March The drybronze prairie grasses whisper inA shifted murmur. Sapphire sky, thinAt the horizon, deep and dilutedIn its very center, soft or muted,Allows a cloud to drift. Or perhaps not.(This is, after all, what I have forgot.)The car you drove was filmed with Kentucky.I (how excruciatingly lucky!)Had only just learned how to braid my hairBackwards, or perhaps upside-down. And thereThe breeze did drift, I swear. The wind was sweetWhile we lived and died, like always. My feetBloomed out of the window. This was the peakTowards which we had been squirming for a weekOr more. Or less. Or forever. Or itNever really happened, and a sunlitDream pervaded then and pervades now the“Self,” which is (quite possibly) to say aStatic perception of a phantom boundTo flesh which, then, is bound unto the ground. Listen closely: here is my death, my birth,My undoing, my “all that is this Earth” –I wore white. You wore – it does not matter.My hair was loose gold. There was a smatterOf angels and demons, pink-quiet andPerfect, desecrating our mother-land.Do you remember (Of course not! For youDo not read this; I know it to be trueThat you do not listen to this; I know –My humble, rough-hewn Brutus, maybe so –It to be true that you will live and dieAgain, and still you will not know of mySong for you, P. For this, a ritualIntended to ensnare instinctualDeath, is a final song for I and I.)The eloquent old man who passed us by?The photograph you said was your favorite?The blush of dusk that you could not omit?The ring of fire in the blue abyss?The glance? The brush? The space? The touch? The kiss? The lines that led to the celestialClimax of this godforsaken idyll? Our only immortality in penIs lived in two parts and written in ten. There was an eclipse just above Starved Rock.I never was a key and lost the lock.