[music]

dances around pale shapes in
blank airless rooms where
people sit and Watch.

Repeating sonatas enfold the rooms.
Twisted and collapsing in time
with languid humming
until somebody moves like the Word moves in them

then
a guesture catches them all
halfway on the left-brained waltz
to the room you're in
with actual speech--a split
measure murmuring something in 4/8
bursts in through an ash door
& the floor vanishes
as the dust coils and tries
to lead you home (in vain)

This all because
A perfect A [444 Hz]
fighting itself in rhythm
has a tendency
to throw the Right aside to gasp
at the void in which it lives
before hitting the ground.

absorbed by molecules & out.

Arc

nothing more harmonic
than several empty rooms
hiding flipdark
chilled chromatic words--swords
to clear a hole in the maze;

set off fractals in your brain.

The Jade

Older than me it stood
within the House of yesterday,
a monument to the fade from lands unknown--
Itself a piece of the Idea-of-Jade,
drinking earth,
sucking air...
and sole blind witness
to crimes of youth.

I held its hand,
asked it nothing;
could never have dreamt
its asexual secrets--
and that I, too, was a potential
world of jigsawed Pieces
growing roots and shifting shapes...
then it fell off
and I was alone
fighting creations.

I was my own,
an icy island adrift--
the landlocked kingdom
waiting to spread to port,
waiting to root again.

I stole the Jade's Magnesium green
and switched it with Iron to make my Blood--
I had to try,
but the bright flare burnt a
hole in my shoe,
and while I stopped to stamp it out,
my memory uncoiled
and slunk into the earth below.

Fixed and broken I made maps of known realms;
a cartographer charting the stones beneath--
the imperial expatriate family,
obliterating
internally
the leaves that would grow on their own
in buildings built by ghosts…

but if I stay too long--too close,
and use my only root towards truth,
there'll be no escape from Walls or Floors,
and
stuck
inside
these
Halls
of
You.