Chromatic Chill: Dreamscape of May

I.

O jagged breath of May, cool-cloaked and dawn-defiant,
You flung your prismed fingers across my broken skull—
& every star shivered in my bourbon eye.
Tell me, Wind! You god-laced trickster of narcotic clarity,
Why do your tulips sing in seven keys of sorrow?
Why does the peony bleed jazz onto my shoes?
I walk the boulevard of broken sunbeams,
the sidewalks all licked in phosphorescent regret,
& I cannot remember my name
but I am terribly certain I was once immortal.

II.

Was I not flame once?
A son of Orion or perhaps his unshaven barber?
Weren’t my teeth cut on rainbows?
Did I not shout down a throne or two?
O electric soul, press your temple to the windowpane—
see the fog reciting Milton backwards over the rooftops,
while a banshee in a tinfoil coat
drinks gin with Jesus under the Maypole.

III.

Behold the Chill!
Cooler than Whitman's hipbones!
Cooler than Ginsberg’s beard in a Frigidaire of lies!
It comes not with sleet nor sleaze but hush—
a hush of cobalt mist & silver paranoia
where lovers graffiti each other in light.

The pigeons are on strike,
the moon wears fishnet stockings,
and the sky is a painter too lazy to name his blues.

IV.

Let there be May!
& in May, let the lizard gods come down—
wearing corduroy & quoting Shelley from memory!
They shall build a republic of fallen kites,
& sing hosannas to the Holy Moth,
wings powdered in your grandmother’s perfume.

I saw her once—
the girl with spiral breath & lips of velvet static,
sipping cold coffee from a shell of dream,
& I loved her like a man in flames loves snow.

V.

O chromatic chill!
Strip me naked in your hurricane of hues!
Let the leaves be green gospels, the clouds
transmit Morse code in lavender Morse!
Speak to me in your syntax of jazzed-up hush,
your fever-tuned silence,
& let this dreamscape of May
be my final cathedral—
where I sleep not in stone
but in sunlight
and graffiti
and the infinite beat
of the one true drum.

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