Circling The Fault-lines: A Sonetto Magistrale

Sonnet I

When it seems that everything’s been said

I’m still stirred by some unformed thing to say,

deep down I think I’ll find it in my head,

some spell to keep this language-ing at bay;

my thinking is my blessing and my curse

(thank God today it’s yielding precious little)

but to be silent or be easy, which is worse?

Critics answer in their voices hot with spittle—

how clean such lofty voices sure must be

to have escaped all that upon which it is frowned,

what distances such confidence must see

while I kick about old fruit upon old ground.

I started for somewhere else but still I’m here,

a little circle for myself to hold the fear.

Sonnet II

A little circle for myself to hold the fear,

a half moon hanging in a crisp blue night,

a cigarette for company, some clear

white wine and the soft delicious fright

that I am now alone, and yet content

that words may never mean just what they mean,

but to imagine I can infiltrate their intent

and measure out the moves of this machine…

such witchcraft in the casting of this spell,

should I drown or swim? I cannot choose,

for though I know our story all too well,

I still feel there may be something left to lose

by owning up to my accuser’s claims—

but they don’t know us, they only know our names.

Sonnet III

They don’t know us. They only know our names

for each other now that we’re not together;

I’m an X, you’re an X, such are the frames

that forecast our meanings, like the weather.

Some like to claim they know what’s coming next

and make decisions based on all their careful notes,

such people are understandably quite vexed

when life ignores their plans and grabs their throats.

It’s raining now, and though that was unexpected,

what’s strange is that the noise against the pane

is soft and comforting tonight—I am protected

by the vagaries of the sky and yet again

the thought that like a moon in its constant ebb and shine,

I could never be fully yours, nor you be fully mine.

Sonnet IV

I was never fully yours! You were never fully mine!

Such is the drama that oft exhausts your will.

It’s time to take a break from all this scheming rhyme

before I imagine that such a hocus-pocus skill

can conjure up more meaning than it does,

but I must confess I have some faith in magic

and to match words gives me quite a buzz,

although I know that so many think it tragic

to appeal to mysteries in a world of science—

I should be avant-garde! I should be new!

And yet here I am in all my old defiance,

concocting poems that star the pronouns me and you.

(Despite the thousands spent on therapy and learning,

still these small events of love continue burning.)

Sonnet V

Still these small events of love continue burning.

I want to tell you that today I pruned my plum

(in my mind another field of dreams keeps churning

If you’re brave enough to wax it, he will come).

He will come! Oh I remember! How could I forget

the swift effusions of delight that always followed

the satisfaction on his face so hot and wet

when he looked down and saw that I had swallowed?

Such tawdry instances of our rapturous glee

should perhaps be saved from public view,

but what the hell, each we are the fruit of its debris

and surely sex, the essence of tradition, can still renew.

Why should poems be such a courteous forum

when life is made of lapses in decorum?

Sonnet VI

When life is made not of decorum, but its lapses

how am I to sit and calmly tolerate

a refusal to makes the leap beyond mere synapses

and engage the deeper chasms of a fate?

You’re a secret-cliché-agent, every instinct seeming dual

I keep expecting a sudden burst of mirrors in your hall,

your ellipses as uncanny as a young linguistic rule.

I think I might be done if you hadn’t been so tall,

so handsome, so funny, and so inventive,

you played the game in ways that never bored,

I’ve tolerated more from you than from other lovers—

(if only once you’d been like them and snored,

I could long ago have punctured my illusions

and spared us all these lame effusions)

Sonnet VII

We could all have been spared these lame effusions

were I not so enamored with a timeless sky,

the moon, the sun, the apple, these innocent old symbols

that I imagine sing out to me to burn, to bite, to try

to mine for sustenance what at first cannot be mined,

a misplaced man who thinks he wishes to be alone,

who has staked so firm his claim on loneliness,

he harkens not to calls—not even on his iPhone,

on which emails, texts and Facebook ‘friends’

contrive a safely coded world fit for distant viewing

by a digi-God, accepting and declining with his finger

(saving the symbolic middle digit for my me and you-ing).

Different searches now; mine a sanctimonious grab at grace—

his the ritual stab at sex with friends from MySpace!

Sonnet VIII

In the ritual stabbing of “I need my space” (to get sexed)

your loudest sounds were of unspoken pleasure,

so how can I believe in meanings the spirits trace (albeit perplexed)

on gestures made when words so poorly measure

how lost we are in language, this bungling potpourri

of who we say we are, what we’ll do, where we’re going?

So close to comedy this spectacle, our struggle to be ‘free’

it kept my faith in wit as another way of knowing

what to make of all the missteps we have chosen,

and choose we did, if indeed we know ourselves below

our layers of armor, the many feelings frozen

by the fear of love, its chilling heat of undertow.

I want for both of us to find, however blindly, a way to shore

ourselves against the light of shipwreck, go sirening no more.

 

Sonnet IX

Against the siren light of shipwreck, ourselves no more!

Does the melodrama of these words diminish my appeal?

Am I a ham-fisted histrionic? Is it just a frightful bore

when I recall the joy of simply knowing that I feel

a trust in instinct, an uncerebral right?

I recall all the kisses, the filthy and the sweet,

the nude maneuvers, the impolite

bodies, the nightly picking at the feet

in an effort at descending from the day,

an unconscious exploration of the soul,

exchanging words in an unexamined way,

too sleepy and secure to feign control;

all the climatic and all the ordinary stuff,

so satisfying, and yet so not enough.

Sonnet X

So satisfying and yet so not enough

to let witty banter take the place of work;

we coasted comically around the tough

questions, those things you always shirk.

And look at me, so ready with the blame

as if I didn’t strangle you with need—

Whatever you did, I surely did the same

in the opposite direction, and with equal greed.

I was older, should have been wiser, acted better,

walked away when first you blinked in shock

of what you’d entered and felt as fetter—

instead I stayed, and tinkered with the lock.

How do we tell what’s breaking from what’s bending?

So many verses written and still this thing’s not ending.

Sonnet XI

How versed must I become in writing endings?

How strongly must I stamp on feelings spousal?

How many times will each of our pretendings

be skewered once more on peaks of fresh arousal?

Oh we can ricochet all night around our connotations

but I really want to climb outside these loops,

surely even in “our love” there is some statute of limitations?

So, once upon a time there was …? Whatever! Forgot the ending—Oops!

Better to have loved and lost, said someone breezy;

I think it's true though I'm sure you'll disagree

and though some dismiss my little songs as cheesy

I feel they sing from the truest part of me.

I still have faith in that place from which we fell,

so please accept my hesitation to go to Hell.

Sonnet XII

Is it hesitation pleases? Accepting this hellish bent

I have had my answer given and withdrawn,

And guilty of saying other than I meant,

I cannot assume conclusions are foregone.

Wheels in wheels are what we each have been,

pretending that we know our opposite directions;

I, presuming solo I could take it on the chin,

you, presuming you should share all your erections.

The arrogance we sport comes home to crow

when alone we find ourselves simply all alone,

I’m bruised and there’s no redeeming quid pro quo,

you’re horny but there’s no one left to bone.

Regrets have all the torture of their leisure

when rhyme is stripped of making sense or measure.

Sonnet XIII

When rhymes are stripped of making sense or measure

the world reveals itself as disorder, or is this false?

Are harmonies an accident, an imposition, or a treasure?

Are we faking it or are we living when we waltz

to music that we think is leading us?

Do we learn the steps or know them from within?

Does living have to involve us in all its fuss

or can we rest assured we’re lost when we begin?

These are the questions I cannot but ask,

the reasons you couldn’t give me what I crave.

Unequal to or just unwilling for the task?

In considering how or if one should behave,

one never knows when or if fate will turn its knife—

is this the constancy that gives pleasure to a life?

Sonnet XIV

Who knows the constancy that gives pleasure to a life?

I aimed for love and soon that bored a hole in you.

So I adapted, was diligent, used my sharpest knife

and still my sculpted words were unsuccessful. So what’s true

of love and language appears to be confounding

as the darkness from which all that first existed

bubbled up the breath that set all life’s echoes sounding—

the mystery cannot be resolved but it cannot be resisted.

And though I claim I’ll cast no more for symbol

when there seems no pure essence to be known,

somehow your trace retains its presence, nimble

as an anxious lover, eager to forgive and to atone,

because something moves the heart beyond the head

until absolutely everything’s been done and said.

Master Sonnet

When it seems that everything’s been said and done,

I retrace myself in circles that keep my fears in line

when I don’t know us, our new names, or if we have begun

to understand the riddle; you are not yours, I am not mine.

And yet some grand narrative of love continues burning,

this constant lapse that decorates life’s cold embrace,

even as it punctures and deludes, it somehow keeps confirming

the need for rituals of truth, we procreators of uncertain space.

And while my siren claims no light for ship-wreck anymore,

will I be satisfied, or is it what is not enough that drives intent

and reverses everything I write in endings musty with before?

In a hopeless hell of hesitations, is acceptance always bent

on rhymes that strip themselves of sense for pleasure?

Is it this inconstancy of knowing that folds us in life’s measure?