There is no defeat

There is no defeat so final 

that victory cannot be rekindled 

from the dew soaked morning ash

of the defeated army's campfires

and carried to the highest peak

to beacon blaze against the surly night

and rally dawn to push it into retreat.

I will not rest. My grave will breathe, 

its uneasy soil heave impatiently, 

roots within tighten their coils like sinews,

if you should think that this is over, 

and everything I did while living was in vain.

The world turns. The past is not fallow, 

but yields to the worm if not the plough, 

and irresistible spring mocks your resignation.

The tongues of its famished fledglings offer 

their treatise on the art of war

that supersedes your articles of surrender,

so there is no defeat while anyone lives

and the world turns. 

Monsters

You may find the bestiary of my verse

an unruly brood, littered with deformities. 

Myths limp, tortured and bleeding, 

from their encounter with my pen.

Lost limbs lie strewn across the page, 

and are hastily arranged to spell a cry for help

which hopefully some reader will see

as they fly over the island at 50,000 feet. 

Perhaps, if they see it, they'll swoop down,

like Bellerophon, to kill my chimerical muse

and save you all from these obscenities

that I cobble together and shock awake, 

a seamstress of freaks 

like Frankenstein or Moreau, 

but all I reassemble is myself. 

My botched attempts, incomplete, 

some blind, others deaf, all lame, 

stumble and grope and wail and moan,

but test them and they will rally

to protect an ageless child, stunted 

by a caul of solitude pierced by these, 

the only companions he has ever known. 

Roll up

Imagine every star is a scale, 

like the scales of a snake or a pangolin, 

but rolled up like a cigarette, and lit, 

dragged while unseen eyes observe

galaxies of distance between us,

a universe of alleyways 

where spies lurk in shadows,

betrayed by their brief billion year glow,

a serpent peeled by the abyss

to indulge a whim whose passing

is measured in black holes

upon the satin night.

That is how inexplicable you are to me,

stranded on this rock.