The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
The Quality of Calcite

experience is a ruddy quagmire of toil
and mirth-laced mind altering to
dampen our birch so we may bend between the fissures
of palms once embossed and fingers losing their grip 
on what we fancied as tools yet ever obsolescing
in winter darkness we knap our hunger into weapons
until we grow bored enough to paint dragons in the 
hearthfire with liver of sage and sulfur 
planning the epic where triumph would suffice

knitting our needled terrors with purled stitches
while reciting the serpent song and sloughing off
another verse from the vixen eye too clever to
pronounce, stuttering falling into muttering
the sputtering fire silences the incantation while
tired eyes search for the last hanging couplet
until warm hotcakes sober the snowblind wandering

the husk of crayons litter the frescoed walls
where summer children flaunt their mimicry of
broad finger-soaked strokes in widely arching banners
heralding the simplicity of their inheritance
the shaman smiling in the corner leans into
the forever overturning of newly farrowed furrows
of mudpie magpies catching glistening grasshoppers 
her gesture gathering the last threads to her breast

bricks eventually pile up like bone mounds
hardening before they slip into the silt
of crumbling cathedral spires and fallen forgotten 
altars where the humble sacrificed their one chance
faintly grasping the inevitable bonfire of their
vane wishing gift-wrapped as a dour dowery
sky bargaining with beans for an open grave 
while sharemind sparkles like an unnoticed dew
crowning the beggars with familiar myrrh 
and turning thatch into plush fossils glimmering
to distinguish their singularity from the
thick wash of the midnight blue velvet fog
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