The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
No Longer Permeable

Cozy the walls that give
definition to borrowed vistas
placid cave pools cool and untouched
return colors to their cages
fallen from the cloudtears of orbits
surrendered to the bindings of earth
plumage molted to an orche skin
only spent smoke remains rising

Muscles snap into sockets
as bone hardens to a new carapice
the sacred seven are culled to five[1]
so breath may choose its insufflation
and return to the baptism of the hungry
whose nutted berries lay pasteurized
by the fever dream's passing into
a more sanguine pallidity 

Free from that corrosive brilliance 
we traded for a pair of favas still 
sleeping undraped in seraph wings
to make stone soup and a broken fast
strange mass pruned to a topiary
with a placard bestowed by the zoo
no longer to wander unbothered or brave
ecstatic frenzy fading into a burial 
once dervish-carved now a lonely mound
upon a cliff no longer leapable
where the wind but whispers without
caressing any peachfuzz-laden jawbone
or the closed ribcage of a newborn monk.
■





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