The Lexicographical Overflow: Sonnets IX – XV
Sonnet IX: The Lithic Lithography
The geosphere is crushed to diamond-script,
In tectonic plates of overlapping prose,
Where basalt veins in liquid fire are dipped
And garnet-encrusted syntax slowly grows.
I mine the schist, the shale, the anthracite,
For pressurized phonemes of obsidian,
To carve a monument against the night
Upon a meridian, post-diluvian.
The stratigraphy of the soul is deep,
Layered in limestone and in fossil-fern,
Where ancient, petrified emotions sleep
In chambers that the molten fires burn.
Let every word be heavy, hard, and cold,
A mountain-range of meaning, centuries old.
Sonnet X: The Thalassic Torrent
The salt-caked lexicon of the abyss
Is churned by typhoons of a churning mind,
Where every wave is a green-eyed nemesis
Leaving the wreckage of the noun behind.
We navigate the bioluminescent foam,
Past coral cathedrals and the kraken’s lair,
Until the vast, unpitying, watery dome
Is all the oxygen we have to spare.
The sextant of the heart is misaligned,
Pointing to shoals of silver-gilled desire,
Where ship-wrecked syllables are redefined
By the cold phosphorescence of their fire.
Drown me in oceans of the polysyllabic,
In currents wild, chaotic, and seraphic.
Sonnet XI: The Fractal Form
The geometry of God is recursive,
A Mandelbrot of multiplying gold,
Where every line is spiraling and cursive
And infinite complexities unfold.
I solve for X in equations of the rose,
Calculating the arc of the falling leaf,
Until the calculus of beauty shows
The square root of our ecstasy and grief.
From golden ratios of the nautilus shell
To the algorithm of the honey-comb,
We find the mathematics of the well
Where all the wandering variables come home.
The universe is a theorem, stark and bright,
Proven in ink against the chalk of light.
Sonnet XII: The Entomological Enigma
Chitinous and iridescent, the word
Flutters on wings of gossamer and dust,
A microscopic music, faintly heard,
Beneath the exoskeleton of lust.
The thorax of the thought is armored well,
With mandibles of logic sharp and keen,
Living within a hexagonal cell
Of honeyed rhetoric and lime-light sheen.
We pin the specimen to the white page,
A lepidoptera of the fleeting mind,
To study in our academic cage
The iridescent traces left behind.
But even pinned, the colors seem to shift,
A shimmering, kaleidoscopic gift.
Sonnet XIII: The Metallurgical Melt
In the crucible of the hot imagination,
We smelt the leaden speech of the everyday,
To forge a shimmering, gold-leafed oration
That burns the dross of the common tongue away.
The bellows pump a blast of oxygen
Into the glowing embers of the verb,
Until the anvil of the soul, again,
Reshapes the iron will we cannot curb.
Quench the white-hot metal in the stream
Of cold, crystalline, intellectual thought,
Until the blade of the poetic dream
Is with a keen and deadly edge inwrought.
A sword of stanzas, tempered in the flame,
To carve the silence of a nameless shame.
Sonnet XIV: The Orchis of Ornament
The hothouse of the heart is over-bloomed,
With epiphytes of purple-veined conceit,
In humid air where every breath is doomed
To be too heavy, fragrant, and too sweet.
The petals of the paragraph expand,
Saturated with nectar and with musk,
Until the very contours of the land
Are lost within a floral-scented dusk.
I am the bee, intoxicated, lost,
Drowning in pollens of the metaphor,
Counting the staggering, aesthetic cost
Of blooming more than nature can endure.
If beauty is a trap, then let it close,
Stifling the senses in a wild repose.
Sonnet XV: The Architectonic Abyss
Behold the buttress and the flying arch,
The cantilevered logic of the grand,
Where columns of the Latin meters march
Across the desert of the shifting sand.
We build a ziggurat of gilded sound,
A Tower of Babel for the modern ear,
Until the pinnacle can not be found
Within the clouds of visionary fear.
The gargoyles of our doubt are carved in stone,
Leering from cornices of ivory,
While in the nave, a solitary drone
Sings of the glory and the misery.
The structure holds, though built of nothingness,
A monument to lexical excess.
No comments:
Post a Comment