Everyday the rosacea sits
at the tip of a nosebleed

Some call this condition an idealism
while too many others diagnose trauma

No trivial doctrines stare
at a face upended
by the holier brow of arched nerves

We live by the exhalation
of air and now count
our slaves as statistics

Justice is seldom uttered
except as an after-breath

Carry on as if there’s nothing
like a fierce misunderstood book
to menace our sanities

But ignore medical texts:
They vex the bible of blossoming
with the metastasis of misfortune

The honing skills of our scalpels
have not yet become God

Displaced energy runs concurrent
with the motion, the gesture, of this gesture:

partially desecration, part homage

a fusion possibly

An attempt to shore up possibility
whittles down
to a concentrated urge
to break all forms
and sculpt shadows into substance

Then take their constituent parts
and export them, one by one,
to collectors who discern
the difference between catalogue
and corpus

Or evil and purposefulness

Categories prevail to ward off
systems becoming too solvent.
Piecemeal contemplation
rouses mental health
in its forbearance of genre
as wholesale entitlement

Were we or I to insist on the difference
settling between faith and despair
all the while obliterating partitions
maybe the wall would fall or at least shudder
and gradually the strictures would
become less definite

Only when the enforcers of Law
recede into abstinence
might the multiplication table
produce real dividends
not divisions

The practice of patience

permits this
denies that

draws a diagonal red line
through the appalling Absolutes

All of them

The Applause button reddens
in exhaustion and passion

It annihilates the restraint set by
the too exhausted
the too passionate

It is waiting to be pressed.