The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Neophytic

Self-deprecation is but the love language
of a soul thrust from legs into the
steaming pile of seething stimuli 
murky miasma of the sulfuric aspect
neither sure of the entry point or the 
proximity of the exit or what methods 
of groping will yield less bitter fruit
ever discovering the apparently astringent
with a pallor so unsanguine as to weep
arsenic tears with a blackened tongue
finding the music bizarrely backwards
and yoked to an ugly, unsyncopated meter 
so sheerly and utterly grating against
the fine hairs on the back of the neck
soon to be burned off and burnished to
scarred sinew since humming natively
is punishable by admittance to the
perpetual labor camp of the hardened.

The forever fetus wriggles against
the carapace with the folds of its
walnut meat plumping in its windowless
compartmental confines, winking with
tangential energies that defy dimension,
dreaming with borrowed symmetries of
colorless words that fail to symbolize,
each bearing complete comprehension
so far flung from lexicon and dirge,
the slow marcescence of the Blossom
whose perfect vapor deposition imparts
new skin to the pending protoplastic 
emergence so it may learn to play
the fool with innocent sagacity unaware
it is about to be swept out by the
midnight tide to twinkle once more.
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