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Ben Miller


Moon and Muse

Lightless sun negative bleaching
A barren window horizon
These are ghost towns in the attics
Dark windows onto winter beaches
Migratory flights from skeletal fears
Dancing on waters that turn from warming icecaps
Stygian breakaways too worn welcome paths

Where is the moon and where is the muse
Moon stabbing all silver light away
In lack of light deserts are screaming
For want of words which carried meaning
Across all bridges of desire


Ego Theater in Rose Light

I can fight for a thousand years in
Long chains of resistance spurring betrayal
Climbing downward into burrows
Which are mazes in reverse
Leading only to rusted gateways
That I paint into gleaming towers
On the dimmed horizons that I care to paint
To deliver myself from elements and isotopes
That isn’t for me to worry
That isn’t for me to sing
That isn’t for me to carry after all

There is no faith in shimmering things
In those diamonds of the mind
Plucked from a hollow ball of earth
I built from faulted hands
Dug into mountains
Delivering no transfiguration
Save for a strange alchemy of ego
Burrows upon burrows again
Tracing tendrils toward each other
A race to the end that is no end

I can fight for a thousand years
Without reaching home
So take me now and carry
What needs to be carried
And I will let go
Holding only that which cannot be defined
Or even spoken in words falling ground-ward
But only offered on words of silence
Grace

II

Grace bestowed is an open window grace ignored
Faith splintered on ignorance and time
No immortality for man alone




Lightless sun negative bleaching 
A barren window horizon
Self-emptying into pools too shallow
Without the moon to feed it and to be fed
Moon and muse in reflective dance
Surface always going deeper

There are none outside the circle
Only ones that haven’t dared the dream
Remember the dream is a memory

Picture



​Ideas are pillars of fortified sand drifting
Used to prop our empires
Of mind and sold on land
And staged in plays of a self
Which dances before my eyes and displays
Finery of nuance that bespeaks
Something grand
But it’s only me crowing to myself
And refusing to linger
In
Grace bestowed
Which I twisted and transformed in
Shades of deconstruction posing
As dances way into
Grace ignored

III

The Rose sings without end
In places soft and wise
The Rose sings in sleeping dawns
Which never awake in the ego spinning mind
The Rose twines on the edges of fabric
And the page we dance upon
And the difference between me and that Mystical Rose
Is that She listens
While I speak
Her heart is open and immaculate
And mine is crushed when
When my empire inside it falls

IV

Carry me open me break me on the wood
Set my feet marching and my mouth finally silent
In those places of knowing
I’ve only dreamt about
Where my proscenium mind has danced and sung
​

Lion Roars but Silent

Lion roars but silent as a dark cat in ever darker sleeping shadows
Under a sky which dares to hum blue birdsong in erupting daylight
We are this crawling to the day and pretend we do not want to be
Hear the roar and leave the hum in a darker night bonfire turning
Still Giving each moment the dream of the fire
And crowning the realization
Go to run from the lion in her dream veiled sleep
But the lion is the night filled with hungry low keening desperate animal sounds
And she surrounds us still in light through hum blue day
A beating in heart in time to the roar
Hands turning to claws at the sound and scraping at covered tables
Beats on the grass and the burnt ground of the savanna road
Distinction loses focus as the ground becomes hot
We scream back at the roar to silence it quiet it within ourselves

And where did you go they wonder
After the screaming stopped
After the heavy steps across the ground
Became quiet
Did you acquiesce into the night call roar
Did you slip into that animal state
Whatever happened to the man before the lion
Unanswered questions pile like kindling
Before the bonfire turning that pretends to hold off the night
And silence the lion beast roar

We scream back at the roar to silence it quiet it within ourselves
And we run from the lion in her chase across the stone burning canyons
Scream dies as roar overtakes then the scream becomes the roar
What we’re hiding in the day pretend for night costume ball on the sands
What did our feeble screams hope to conceal
Did we slip into that lion dream state put the lion before the man
Dreams of something raw and hot in place of tied and bound
Sinking into the roar most velvet of cushions opulent in giving fire
Man before lion not lion before man loses meaning
In a roar that climbs circles likes notes over savanna sky
Distinction ceases to matter as the roar becomes the song
And the song becomes a whisper in the roar of we cat in daylight darker shadows

Comments?

***

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