Empty Quarter # 5: The Need To Be Forgiven

I  was unshriven early on.

It was surely a crooked thing,

Pilloried by the most recidivist of

Memories.

It takes a soiled priest to know one,

Or a fellow traveller on an unravelling mountain pass,

Knowing the man across the aisle is praying the bus

Will  breach the cliff-edge, at last.

The Empty Quarter is no metaphor.

It is pure desert, nothing more.

Its borders—shift—so that it is

Never mapped with any accuracy—

It is only—really—inhospitable to man—

Its careless body spans unalloyed

To any industry—and it is this we will remember—

That to be forgiven for any past transgression

is here—the sand in the wind-swirl, filling

your eyes, stinging your skin—

until we can begin again—wholly covered by the dunes.

The moon, a slit of light,—feint stars—just to be—

Giving nothing in return—the secrets

Safe with me.

something almost uncontained.

red socks, blue shoes. sunspots

Empty Quarter #2

Empty Quarter #2

Blown in, weather-swept waves,

The sky turned through the wires—

Sheer bruises unsettled over the city.

Waiting for something.  Anything.

A man at the road-edge.

Lithe imprint, where the desert begins.

Granular in what it moves.

In the event of no return—

Substitute—me for him—and let it stand

That a man, on the road-side

Abandoned, is one smooth remove

From the end of the world—

           See—the edifice sheared off in the distance,

          Dry channels, choked rivers—

Endlessness—

         Where the sea once was.

Empty Quarter #45

Waveless, though woven

Through—the wind-

Shift indiscernible;

Sticks in idling gears,

Fans out into rivulets,

Wears away

Mechanism after mechanism.

We weren’t geared for this.

With dirt, there is cleanliness

In the volume.

As sand goes, there is a scouring

In the grain—a big fuck you--and the trail

For that just disappears.

Empty Quarter #7

When the sun exploded—

                Nothing near, nor since—

The desert came last—floods foremost,

Scalding seas across whatever was.

You can see this, still, in the dogged

 bleakness—

We blunder on—

diffident now,

Unsure of the edges,

Or if any exist.

Yet deep in the grit, the grainy altar, whatever                                            

Falls through your hands is already

Re-assembling itself into another world,

And needs nothing of you—though we have all,

At once, caught fire, and fallen through the sky,

Clouds of slate and ash, a bit of skin,

An eyelash. 

There will always be wind,

Wildly respirating  lungs,  iron-oxide

 bellow tending  the fire,

scorching the world as it ever was,

 or will be.