fpens

Among the twisted lanes, Al-Andalus Is home and rack for gypsies bred to fear From years of heartless death and cruel abuse, Their sorrows unappeased by loves that sear. This wail and beat of passion without hope, The stoic pain and dignity of songs Vented to express a universal trope, Defying the death that magnifies the wrongs. A guitar whose silver frets ordain the pitch, The shadows mass, the spruce and cypress weep. He strops a razor on our nerves, with rich Rough rasps, intense and brutal in their sweep. A keening howl of shredded chords - this his Pulsing cry - the blackened sounds - of that which IS.

The ronin building labyrinths of icons Flying the web's collage of liquid light That summons us to quaff its frantic photons, Its soaring travesty of tunneled flight. The shaman of the fractal paradigm Inscribes incantations only the arcanely Skilled may deeply read in virtual time, While shards of holograms contain ungainly Palimpsests of pixels.  Syntax hacks Forging their hyperlinks in cryptic words, Scriveners of the void, a vulgate that tracks The vibrant neon space...ellipses and surds. He seines the depths for images - mind hacking, To curdle chaos into clots of meaning.

The page once folded, remains - never to be Unblemished, the paper's grain never to regain The purity the print conveyed to me. The written word creates a permanent stain Upon the brain, a pewter palimpsest Conceals the tangled history of the mind. The name below the title echoes the quest Of those forever mute who are unsigned. The flash and gaudiness of cyberspace - Computer words can be as often scrap As the untrodden route to inner space, So little time for patient nibs on foolscap.     Our virtual poems inscribed in minuscule     Can reconstruct the world in majuscule.

A layered section through the tell of the mind, To sort the strata of a buried past. The broken walls of old defenses bind Us in a dungcairn we will not outlast. Unearth the psychic potsherds, sleepless nights Of votive offerings in the caves of fleece. The glowing rubble of futile dreams, insights From artifacts that promise endless peace. Tell us about the man who left the palace And its smoky light, who sought the way To learn about himself, impetuous To regain his vanished past without delay. The cryptic sequences inscribed in ruins Portend what he must learn to read as runes.