The phantom roams the streets, coming
with sulfur breath through its lament
of the morning that’s too sober, smeared
with blood and urine and last night.

A disturbed existence with no bread
for the masses or circuses, only the crown
he wears; entwined thorns infecting rotting
skin with words and louder voices

from back alleys — a magic if swelling
like a storm or fantasy over the sea.
The persistence of autumn raped the land
and left the earth ravaged; the story

of a savior arrested as a thief, pushing
onward, over, under, and down,
gouging his soul like meat,
closing his eyes behind the doors

of a warehouse where the light is too bright
to see — no glass houses for his birth
or closed rooms for his death, diving deeper
and probing the silent sidewalks and breathing.

No gold, clocks, or rocks; no silver, copper,
or flowing oceans; doomed to be worshipped
and pouring over the backyards of summer, the lots
where children play and grow

sumac and concurring worlds. He wrote
his shadow plays with his back
to the mirror and acted the out by moonlight,
on the beach just beyond a bonfire, and in the sand

melting beneath — fading into fusion and becoming
glass, blurred words, and the restlessness
that haunts paintings, photographs, poems, stamps,
and encyclopedias — becoming the epitaph, the splendor,

and the urge of sterile nails to find virgin palms,
fearing what the headstone will say. Frozen
in a world that no longer contains the trees
that once possessed these fields, tangled in green, unsuspicious of ice.