☀ Today's Poem: "a SONNET" Jos Charles

i.

The episode, the dream, ended. I see the path and the path I stray. To speak thy
     name—purgation. Saturday,
at the hour the veil is thinnest, auburn, where the horizon is thinnest. In the hour
     my brother hath left me, name in an hour, a time, of dying.
To even speak thy name. No witness possible for those of us listening
     to music in our cars on the 405 tonight.
All I have learned is to lift my head. That we met, a child’s shirt on, every muscle
     I thought pushed your face to grin,
in a kitchen, docs and jeans—I’d never seen anything so holy—and you spoke to me?—a woman,
     naked, devoid of every virtue?
The key you gave before the lock, you don’t have that much agency, you’d say.
     In my misery, it’s me, it’s me. Holy Saturday, you, exiting.
Echolalia. Beside nobody, in a queue like a book. A mutual friend messages me on Instagram
     and what is there to say,
we met, we met, outside a dream, we met? Saturday, first date, I repeat something cruel,
     rightfully, you stop me.
Echolalia. Or, acquisatory, speaking of Blake, out back in a scarf and tape, laughing
     at boys in boating shoes,
intellectual and evangelical, as all are evangelical, in the United States.
     Without you, imagine, otherwise the paltry sum of speech I’d be.
Echolalia. Out back, in a sheer top, many starred and open air’d, speaking the
     same shit, the sacred contains the secular, the spirit, reality.
Echolalia. Boys bristle at the crinkle of thy turning tape. Who hold me in me.
The episode, the dream, ended today. The saddened powers, we. All I’ve learned
     to speak is one among thy many-splendored names.
Child among children. Our self-same sun. I lift my head.