There must be beasts
that crawl like moons
behind the city buildings

I stare at their fumes
that spiral toward solitude
and the streets like swollen
veins struggling against
the violence of light

I have not spied them enough
nor have I done fair scholarship
to deduce their silences

I am more of a theologian
deducing with furious axioms
their temptation to laugh
and recording the syllogism
of wings that chisel
the silk of decay

they are beasts of atmosphere
and dawn and the noise of eclipses
and in one ambitious hallucination
we coexist with their rosy disasters

who are they, the monsters
these vehicles of modern destiny?

I cannot answer.
There is no final system.
The roads are covered with
the round tears of the desert.

The news has not reached paradise.
we are here to stay – on earth, at noon –
with our blue and sentimental beasts;
whatever savage offspring of our dreams.

Contemporary Poetry