After Rimbaud

Eyeless atmosphere’s lust to open, inhaled…

The poem’s body.

And soft as stairs whose steps extend to

Cover my words finally as flesh so sweet. Door:

Each floor is a shaved bed and each piece of broken

Light on the crown, northern and left-brained,

Of my shrinking, bright, and enslaved to fragile logic,

Porcelain head-

Shaped gate to the old heaven,

Smiles primordial steam

From its swamps’ membranes, lidless pineal gland,

As horseflies land, externally,

Onto the wombs

Of pencils from inside New Orleans morgues.

O precious door dripping with the dew

Of the view from my cave, why can’t you talk

As you open?

Why do poems moon from your womb?

So many heaven-phallic virgin births under Muse’s wing!

As she sits outside herself, huddled in the corner

Of the shower floor,

Graves sky

Your helpless lips,

Where vines

Of veins guard your entrance

Where you are always a precious mouth,

Facing downward

To surround the virgin world’s opening

Before your kamikaze dive

Hits the face of the water. I wanted to be alone

Instead of just a part of your departure from content.

Mark Fleury is a poet and stay-at-home Dad in St. Paul Minnesota.His poems have recently appeared in Transcendent Visions, The Storyteller, Ruah, Ceremony, Poet’s Haven and Down In The Dirt. He also has a chapbook entitled Spirit Light Naming Sound published through Scars Publications and Design. Fleury also published three poetry books through Scars, In Your Heart, the Apostrophe’s Teardrops of God (2010), Angel’s Syllable is Good Boss of Devil’s Spine (2011),and The 4D Window (2012). Mark considers his poems to be surreal, projective verse.