Anagram

Choosing what I’ll remember is like choosing what I’ll dream.
The moments, the people, the feelings, and places
Surface in a sieve, drawn from the fines of life impermanent,
A scattered totem of anecdotes pretending purpose.

I puzzle with this anagram of souvenirs tumbling inside,
Arrange and rearrange, arrange and rearrange,
With each iteration I laugh or cry or regret or feel reassured.
Oh look, a new piece, where does this one fit?

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”)

Spacetime

Bodies massive locked
In tandem dervish arcs,
Drifting in a cosmic tide,
United on the fabric time.

More massive orbs yet,
Sitting deeply in their well
Distort the membrane,
Drawing the dancers in.

Orbit upon orbit twirling,
Dimples in the cloth
Merge in a vast funnel,
The sloped rim calling.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “I Am He That Aches with Love”)

TBD

Yonder sits old man me
Boiling pistons poised aflame,
Bald tires on rheumatic axels.

Grayed ozymandian appetites
Leveling snide taunts anew
At my ever-bowing ragged brow.

From whence shall joy spring,
If not lusty youthful ventures?
TBD.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “O Hymen! O Hymenee!”)

Helvetia

Steepled hills ever green,
Sown into a lounging heathered haze,
Eddy about a dew soaked valley,
Innocent of their frosted emerald seduction.

This place neither knows nor cares
About beauty or my languid praise.
It neither resents the dozing fog
Nor pines for summers fair.

I am born from the same earth
Shall I worry more?

-T. Weeks
(A response to “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d”)

Eden

Lucifer sits, coat in hand,
Fumbling rusty aphorisms.
He chews a thumbnail
Too far down, ambivalent.

The captives, emancipated,
Shade their unadjusted eyes,
Ashamed of enlightenment
Homesick for their garden.

-T. Weeks
(Inspired by “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals”)

Appraisal

The hapless savant paints,
Not for postmortem praise,
But for redemption by effigy
In that one hour to madness.

Behold, the masterpiece.
Reckless strokes blistering,
Scabs across a defiant dream,
Rendered through a pinhole.

Is it the tortured backstory,
Woven at the auction house,
Or the travailing phantom
That hums lovely to your ledger?

-T. Weeks
(A response to “One Hour to Madness and Joy”)