On the edge of the initiate’s fingernail lies the secret longitude, the lost Parallel
by Joseph Milford
“May the good Lord help us,” San Martin said, looking at the crucifix
which hung over the captain’s bunk on every ship (in Don Fernando’s
cabin it had been replaced by an astrolabe).
Napoleon Baccino Ponce De Leon
I.
indefinable country of the generic
perfect tourists the pantheon of pluralistic pamphlets
the wilderness, its gamut just plain riffing here
tour-boats never sink, it seems burgeoning
espousals of lyric maps between stations
rain forests captured in fist-sized plastic globes (shake them
to make it snow) uncharacteristic propositions
of trajectories, directions, a slender filament
toggling you from receipt to receipt, from
weathervane to pump
hope dangles on this line attempts to pull as taut
as eyelids embalmed as scalpeled extremes in museums
on the borders pressed against our amebic theories
the rationales kill as many as the indirectives misguide
and the eye explodes, chides its own vision despite
snapshots
in these explosions of probables goggles melting, yet focusable
the ontology of the heart is navigable
the wind, that mirror of what is blown, fragment
wisp of single hair crossing a lens a concentration broken
like a feather disconnecting
over a dark pool, lilting
down to its catalyst ripple its function
transmogrified flight over the broken easel of yesterday
stern prow of purpose we hide our atlases
under stones, and what lies under stones and the lies
we whisper there the tracks we erase
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II.
there is no adamant atomization of the All that can be captured in an alembic,
I’d say
I imagine what it would have looked like, a poetic book-device.
what resemblance, burning ash, silt of a man’s flesh, God’s one bad idea?
strokes of genius across landscapes, the mastercraft.
in pastorals, desire is a quasar for dullards, a cloud of infant stars
spoiled by their own light, stingy for it. and stars holding back the day’s
wings until they snapped, and gave all their vortices to night like kindling
like bones. spent sparkler and incense stems. the thieves that we were
before we were born stole all the answers, tore the curtains for their sails
and these spirits escaped into any oblivion of our births
as light comes through the rips they made in the firmament
we endeavor to call the illuminations holy
they may or may not be.
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III.
and the printing press of night and its paranoid fanzines of moonlight
and the diabolical yes-men, a battalion of double-standards stealing
your breaths for shields, for excuses to acknowledge
a nobler chaos. damn Being. bless
the farspanning parallels never to meet where the triggerfinger becomes
the impetus of the hand and the hand assumes
the helm of the heart
blessed Being, we are all stowaways here
foreigners within our own forms
when we touch
how it terrifies us
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IV.
here is where the maps are spoken.
topographical torque in the tongue’s rigging.
you sketch the plateaus with a desert-whisper
and the mountain ranges with a hint of ocean
Classical
the plot as full as any alternate
pathways in this jungle yet to be written
in longhand, cursive upon the clefts that we’ve
put down. leaves inscripted are silly
under such boggling surveillance. I know this. Fluid
clarion, siren quetzals over lobes of hills.
Paradise is remembered ground.
here, in breath’s intervals, the alternating gusts
surrounding the raptor mind
as it converges on one name
and as if that was all it ever had to do,
ever,
just this one
perch
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V.
even our provisions have become provisional here
where the natives teach an animism, the way spears also kill the air
on the way to the kill, we whisper instinct to be gone
we shackle the primal to our sunbaked bibles, we hope
that the four corners of the world still support the tent-poles
we are not owned by this urge, this need to find some eternal
opposition to be pitted against, we languish here, we ponder
and the wind testifies as flowerspores leave their wombs
astrally, uniformly
in blossoming shrugs
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VI.
this is my Body.
take of my Body.
I touch your Body
to take my Body back.
Eco-Ego, I’ll be your country.
a daybreak vision.
this is my Body.
we are ours.
the Soul being the meat of Light.
the Light our Desire
lingering without and around us.
the Light is the thirst for Envelopment
its Desire is entrance.
we shall open one another,
apart together,
God’s broken thumbnail
cracked open
a universe
an island
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VII.
when a certain vista implores you, be wary I say.
you should implore a shore before there is ever a sea.
you must allow my double-helixes, my halos, my albedos
to illumine boundaries. is it enough for now to have faith?
hunger stalks like the beast it wishes to kill, lithe, pantheresque
and passion eats too much passion until it defies quantum physics
that we can be so much in ourselves and still exist
I would drink a salty sea of forgetfulness
I would carry a mask and let light escape the facade
of its mouth as the mutiny ensues
I will never again be thirsty
dropping anchor into the spirit eddying destinations
yes the flesh inhabitable
islands
ideological archipelago
atomization of the All as the shattered alembic
Other poems by Joseph Milford in ActionYes #2:
I let the reins go
the somnambulist
Fossilized Roadmap
my first semester
a way of getting there
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