'82 Years Later, On A Tuesday (At Monk's House, for Virginia Woolf)', by D.M. Rice

Torn open chrysalis, dear reader, these enigmatic fragments brush over the sea of years, decide themselves extant in my collective imagination––deviant cycles tending the garden of earthly conditioning, for this too must be cultivated by the loquacious hand of genius, whose faltering persists like a stubborn mark on the wall––vagrancy is the obscure conduit which flushes pink rose to censure, hope transfigures leaves into confession, the folio of idle digest thumbprints trace your outline, crook of your nose, warm collarbone quivers under my attention, reaching further down, this alchemic despondency, recurrent nonconformist, firebrand relations in artibus, that incestuous nightstand, cruising public holiday parks with toil, just forgive the anachronism for its honest gambit, subversive conformity of form, senile youth held in hand by Plato, Virgil stamping along a puerile trust, forgetting the dearest for what is common cause, perambulating assay fought for at the price of a drowning man, ego, denial, projection feed played on loop to catharsis, midnight vows given secretly under the furtive bedsheets, sisters in blood and bone, expectant rooms, bodies communicating, unfurled branches of ecstatic plume, purple dye to stain the historical record, my quiver of clever costumes veiled in the unknown name, now that I am silent I may know beauty, assured by the convivial heartening, our shared pantheon of stunted liveries, breed me, oh memory, I shall lie as the barren field aches for sapling sprout, unmixed terms of art devoid of movement, I shall linger after winter's frozen embrace, sullen storm, debased and unscrupulous tannins wilting in the open bottle, I shall peer into the crevices of that partition between us, the gulf of granularity, roots akimbo like stalwart veins, and if the circle breaks, the fellowship disbanded, and art relegated to a memory, we shall walk the downs at night among the graveyard fireflies and scuttling waters where you left us, harbouring to finish your gross labour, Senecian honour, for I too have engrossed and feathered the best in me, to make mockery of a mottled cathexis, exultation in the trite machine of praxis, dialogic tenderstem fresh laid over the mourning stone that weeps its stasis as the sparrow flickers in the distant future, precarity of orchids and their progeny, nightingale caged in the narrow of her throat, walking over the dull pavement of London, questioning the cost, an internal reckoning, estate to sovereign will, clash in the burgeoning waters, wide enough to cradle in the grave, my destiny has been to plait the discord here between us, what inconceivable cowls here insulate, calendar carried across the ouse river, not one but many beings in one, a multiverse of cardinal sin and apotheosis, enduring discord in the wake of a newborn recurrence, total sum warfare in the ignorant mass media, waste paper left to rot in the garden before the unlit search party, and still I should not tarry, walking in the distilled essence with your hand in mine, breaking the fast while snatching at your waistcoat buttons, in my bed upon the infinite depths, what dreams may cradle me to sleep, a solitary tree under the rippling gray, the wind bows down to launch the precipice, and faithless may I grant you competition, whom shall I meet there, invisible meeting at the liminal scene, jagged edge of nostalgia in an inextricable accent, tossed about the waves weighed down by assembly, put to vote in the parliament, presumed quixotic, featureless depths, and the gargantuan, anchorage in lotus blossom calm on the blood swell, this lighted strip of dalliance, abyss and praxis dissolved into vapour, retreating to the illimitable sky, silver ripple by the  lily pad, illuminated purpose, churning in the cruel sea, presence itself the quickest poison, fatiguing moths in the hole-worn shawl you're wearing, sunk, scattering shadow to a narrow frame, metonymic castration of context, romance of rotten apples, darkness you, you darkness, light upon light, you upon you, swollen text, surf clams in the daily bread, circuitous elm groves, busts of practical commemoration, where I found you again wandering at the night to ease this burden, I have placed the flowers in your hair and breathe the naked moment, here together while the dawn hesitates, like an intruder on our privacy, aloof pretence under the greenhouse scholar, left a widower without, my phrases were the envy of the desperate, sophisticate in borrowed clothes, sailed across the pantheon of hours, an early spring of languor beyond time, beyond history, to bring the open fire resolution, striking lightning in the killing fields, haunting chorus rising under the sunk cost, phantom fingers wrapped onto mine, clutching pearls of wild relics, doomed lucidity, jealous now, bearing the modest grin of the tideless, unrelenting bloom, 

D.M. Rice is a writer and co-eic of Sybil Journal, now based in the south of England. They have recently published their first full-length collection, Moby Pussy.