Tuesday, August 17, 2010

By reason of breakings they purify themselves (Poem)

This is a sonnet of sorts (backwards, if anything: sestet, then octet) I've been tinkering with, riffing off of this verse in Job, letting words play off of and harmonize with each other, letting language spin out and out.

Your thoughts welcome. (If you've no flash player, click here for your listening pleasure.)

* * * *

By reason of breakings they purify themselves.
So Job. So flesh flung in leviathan's wake,
rolled loose soul in the infinite boil. So leviathan
riffing off the riptide, cacophonous staves
upwelling from the Good Book's selvage swart
with the fingerprints of sin's compulsive caress.
Sins legion as the ridge and whorl of waves
spread horizonward from leviathan's violent
weave. Sins thin as spindrift—lustrous spit
and prism—spun from the tango of scale and sea.
Sins brazen as scales down compulsion's backside:
Weathertight. Weather trim. Weathered
shiv and shimmer breaking on bodies blanched
in the rush and boil of birth.

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