Sleepless Rose

Sheer vault of verdigris and cobalt

Taut atop the etherized streets

Vacant and blind their drifts through time

Dream-worn and endless

As the glissade of the dew drop

Down the sleepless rose

Benighted crimson rose robbed

Of her berobe’d blush, robbed

By a suborning wind 

Running fugitive at nightfall

Through sedated neighborhoods

Filled with the oxide glow of lamps 

Above furtive streets-

Citrine and acid green

Beneath the tarnished sky

Stilled called heaven
Where advanced alchemies are performed in gutters

Ex nihilo, The City Of Man.

Hurled stone of star seed,

Ex coelis, Lapis exillis!

Meteor of civilization thrust upward-

Shards of streets and buildings arising

Splintered, gleaming like crystals,

Shafts and clusters streaming upward

Into skyscrapers and bridges-

Rays of countless perspectives

Of  seconds and minutes and degrees of space

At myriad points of attention.
All motion coming together,

Gleaming in crystalline perfection:

The City a jewel at nightfall,
A sleepless rose.

Seeing in my mind’s eye a panoply of vistas

A swirl of ancient places transposed

Over the Berkley/Oakland horizon.

Going in my mind’s eye,

Following the visual perfume

Whither this universal city of man first began.

The dust in my vision 

From Erech to the foundations of Rome.

The empire of memories overlaid

Of great places of the past

Strewn over the map of imagination, 

Its compass rose

Totally awake in all directions

I see encapsulated through the window

Into a prism

That which sees through me, sees past me, sees beyond me

Sees now, in toto, the assemblage of every step of

Civilization, 

Panoptic, like a jewel, multifaceted, spinning.

The Sleepless Rose

Spinning in the eye of the wind

With countless rooms and stairways inside 

And countless reveries

In a kaleidoscope of rose petals.

Rose of time which never sleeps,
Turning and turning in cosmic mansions of mind,

In a starry vista of prisms

Hung in a window that teems with rays and facets

Which scatter throughout the windy room in which I sit,

Ensconced in a psychedelic vision

Bewildered by the magnitude of it all.