The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
The Ascent

I. Scattered Self

How carefully we sow our sacred
depths in unbothered objects of
variably-persistence-melting 
to exhibit moon refractions to
scare away the unrepentant who
land nearby in the foreshadows.

How widely we winnow our wants
into constellations of virtue signals
casting our die of judgment to opine
and prognosticate for the children
tomorrows that will never come
encrusted in legacies undone.

How our facets glitter glimmers
of our chosen intentionalities
while the window to our soul
sits vacantly for a sojourner 
to gaze in over a cup of tea
brewed from our beach's ocean.

II. The Vandal Slakes Upon The Vale

Where knowledge babbles brooking
in transparent eddies of understanding
pouring forward over whelm and whimper
soaking the defiant with ebullient epiphanies
mendicant mind fissures slowly gape open.

Where warm trickles the trembling leg
overlooking the hoary tomb's chasm edge
the collapsed core of grief unwinds in silken moans
theorem dust drains into lost coefficients
of fate superimposed over newly fallen footsteps.

Where vies the vaulting vanquisher
who steals fire from memorial mentation magma
and drives capriciously knapped obsidian through
the matrix of woven time gartered with folded spaces
into the arterial flow of crystalline divinity
to sip and guzzle at the carotid of impossibilities reborn.

III. On the Gravity of Choosing Coffee Over Tea

Who asks who asks
searching among the echoes of apparent agency
we skip our apologies across our tenuous awareness
miming our steps into stillness.

Who may I pour a cup for?
with this amount of cream
and those minutes of patient cooling
we sip on an ornately-carved amphitheater

Who heeds the ides of the unidle
stages tragedies for the all too initiated
for no one knows or has ever heard
the answer of our meta-rogations.

IV. The Pyre of Now

What shall distill illusions 
reframe our scribbled map
sanitize our corpulent seraph?

What offers honest ashes of
our ardent determinations
in the smoky ruins of our morality play?

What unleashes from flesh
skips our star soul from its orbit
is chosen mercy nurturing the unexpected breath.

V. Hallowed Clarity

When violet days unfurl their dawn
gathered loss teaches new song

When passion's fire consumes our edge
form is born forth upon tomorrow's ledge

When honor has spent its hallowed day
clear eyes paint charred glyphs away.

VI. I am the Epilogue

I am
Who ascend
This pyre of clarity
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