The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Vagabond Showers

I do not despise the dustiness
between my toes or the chafing
of spent canvas and buckshot jersey
trappings of an unascetic hermit
who left the party for adventure
and made the week end on Tuesday

My nerves never tire of twitching
to the prick of existential wonder
the utter lack of ennui 
the crack of geodes beneath my hammerfall
to find brittle teeth pouring 
refractions across my college-lined paper
suspended between the pinnings of thready
thoughts and eviscerated by the 
need for novelty to reach the never before
enervated extremity, soft canvas spreading
like automata dancing relentlessly
strange motion etching away the edges

Until the rain falls softly humbly 
as it ever has and so shall unassumingly
baptise our ablutions into sparkling glyphs
ungilded icons to the beyond so many many
doors to explore and find ever more
permutations of the possible to be embodied
and then returned to the collective 
ornamentation of complexity as it crumbles
into newborn denominators.
■





©2024 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.