poet as past

i.
witness the word in extinction as it tries to catch flame     but there is no past as you try to forget    but there is no hint of yearn to climb out of the past as you try to forget   and the word it catches a sorry flame  a flight a plight of memory       the rot will address you with a candor   it will – the rot goes     away – it does     will the perhaps join with the possible? there are shadows there is the surrender given by shadow

ii.
What is forgiven is a sword’s
Bluntness in the face of the
Swill of a broken pen, a jar
Full of ink and a dry parchment
Remembering the tree that bore
The sun’s astute light and the
Night that hung over your song
As it hummed a whisper, and we
Listened, and it is forgotten.

iii.
the kinetic past is residue
   of whole dismemberments

as it rushes past what it’s
   due as it gleans the dew

from yet another morning
   dreamt of at another time

another rim of ancientness
   sloshed in potency as rhyme

iv.
How shall I use the burning bush if
Moses is not calling? Twelve hundred

BC – give or take a few hundred – and
You get ahistorical amnesia, the

Burned bush vying for complements &
Additives; memory is short, slighted.

v.
We want to burn that
   carcass, to sing the
   trap, to mine each

Dime of trope; this is the
   carcass of time that
   reads every prophetic

Din with erasure, each myopic
   doom with time’s undying
   rapture of forgetting.