Mortificatio
Ray Corvi

Look at this most peculiar
         flower:

Though it has fallen
bees still go to it

         as though our nights were never
         made of midnight blue

         or run through by a gale

whereon the sovereign bird discards
its wings mid-flight

         as one would a ladder climbed
         to the attic of the mind

         somehow counting motes of dust
         in a light gone slat-
                                    ternly

         Use song:

The song of several solitudes
progressive in propinquity

to grief-worn solace
the self that is solemnity

crying: I can hear you
         god-begotten

skeptical of truth

                           Hour-mouth

                                                       you

who mauled the lion tamer
              as a favor

              for a friend

I shall not make promises forthwith

of a hue as green
as the iris of an indigene

colored fatal eau de Nil

much too near the music
              of metastatic midnight look:

The sky it presses inward
The hour of caesura

when the mute earth sings

like the burning beams
of a burning house

                           He couldn’t get out …

She mouths the words:

                           “It’s ok”

& they enter my mind a mantra
that annihilates my self

               This is where it lives
in the pit of my gut-feeling

                           ere I die
perform your autopsy

when you construct

              &         re-
construct

my         child-
               hood

tell them all I’m someone else

There is no greater miracle
than the freedom of the will

oceanic

                           mere
              malevolence

dream-ambiguated

paper-
cuts                                            &
                                                    para-
                                                    praxis


mitered                                      unbidden
                                                     initiate

              before
              before

your homespun

              reversal

at the perihelion

              of
              a





              primal scene

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