The Lexicographical Overflow: Sonnets IV – VIII
Sonnet IV: The Mycology of Metaphor
Subterranean, the rhizome-logic creeps,
A mycelial web of hyphenated thought,
Where the unconscious, fungal memory sleeps
In damp-dark cellars by the senses wrought.
Sporulating stanzas burst in velvet gloom,
Lichened with adjectives of copper-green,
As lexical decay provides the room
For necro-flowering tropes to grow between.
I taste the petrichor of ancient Greek,
The earthy humus of a Latin root,
And find the very syllables I seek
Are ripened into heavy, swollen fruit.
Dig deep beneath the topsoil of the plain,
And drink the dark, hallucinogenic rain.
Sonnet V: The Astrolabe of Argot
We chart the heavens with a brassy tongue,
Mapping the quasars with a quintessence,
Where planetary pulleys have been swung
In orbits of high-frequency fluorescence.
The zodiac is but a ciphered script,
A parallax of shifting, stellar signs,
With every star in liquid starlight dipped
To illuminate these geometric lines.
Behold the pulsar’s rhythmic, glottal beat,
The nebula’s chromatic, gaseous swell;
No firmament is ever quite complete
Without the naming of the chronicle.
We are the lens, the mirror, and the spark,
Writing our neon cursive on the dark.
Sonnet VI: The Anatomical Altar
The corpus is a codex, bound in skin,
Illuminated by the pulsing vein,
Where capillary narratives begin
Their scarlet journey through the labyrinth-brain.
I sing the ossuary’s white-limed wall,
The thalamus, the vertebrae, the valve,
For in this temple, nothing is too small
For the physician-poet’s golden salve.
We stitch the sinew to the soaring phrase,
Anoint the viscera with myrrh and ink,
And walk the red, rhapsodic, pulsing maze
Until we stand upon the vital brink.
The heart is but a drum of heavy meat,
Keeping the time for every rhythmic sheet.
Sonnet VII: The Clockwork of Chronos
The escapement of the ego clicks and whirrs,
A horological madness in the bone,
As every second-hand of syntax stirs
The gears of all we have ever known.
We are the artisans of ticking time,
Regulating the spring of the sublime,
Encrusting every cog with jeweled rhyme
To mask the silent, existential grime.
The pendulum swings wide from A to Z,
A scythe of silver in the hall of hours,
Severing the threads of what was said
To nourish the entropic, temporal flowers.
Wind up the key and let the mechanism groan;
We write in brass what we cannot carve in stone.
Sonnet VIII: The Prism of the Phantasmagoria
Refraction is the law of this domain,
Where white light shatters into seven fires,
And every droplet of the falling rain
Is tuned to the vibration of our lyres.
We hunt the spectrum’s ghost, the infra-red,
The ultra-violet pulse of the unseen,
Until the very words that we have bred
Are shimmering in teal and tourmaline.
The iris of the eye is but a gate,
A convex portal to a world of glare,
Where heavy-lidded visions lie in wait
To saturate the thin and oxygen-less air.
There is no shadow here, only the hue
Of everything the language can undo.
No comments:
Post a Comment