New Songs for an Afterlife

Interrupted sleep is still sleep. At least nine hours,
broken into stems, this long weekend. Each night
recovering a lost sense of self. Restless, unnerved,
woken from intense dreams about gathering crystals
from a business going out. Crystals of color, electronics,
a microphone stand with bizarre gear attached,
stack of high-end video cameras might still work.
Afterlife of quartz and silicon.

Last night, poet, a small god's song lyric.
Not a shock, once immersed in songwriting,
the obvious poem come out as lyrics. Words dreamt.
Three new lyrics this past month, poet, steady
trickle if not flood. Only half-rhymed, structurally
loose, looking for a new word to say what's familiar,
feeling forward into the unknown. Three new songs
sit by the hearth of dreaming. The more you dream,
the more you write. Gradually gathers into new sets,
a new book. A scattering of words. Some connection
to leaves fallen across grass and flesh alike.

Chain links between paint and film, conflagrations
of carpet fiber, ash, gravel, lost keychains.
Charms for an afterlife of trash and dead symbols.
An angry dying painter makes collage, painting words
into the swirling vibrancy of his last large paintings.
Paintings about dying, paradoxically full of life.
Serenity and rage beside each other, holding hands.
Two saints of agony and ecstasy, roped barbed-wire
cattle dragged to the dullest seaside ledges.
Journals of paint and alchemical magic. Dancers
waltzing the skulls of their gone lovers
in the apocalyptic sundown. Make me a ribbon to wear
from the sinew of your broken thighs.
Write poem lyrics with withered skeletal hands.
An afterlife for songs, long past the singer's
expiring exhalation.