The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Inner Sanctum Living

Beneath the smile and kind banter
beneath mask and fat suit and sweatpants
'neath creamsicle daydream indulgences 
and bedside terror sweats of neuronausea
at the dos prompt, you find a door crack
glass ceiling cleavage of firmware bedrock
whether malfunction or glitch, curiosity
slips with lithe justifications behind the
cave wall paintings down crystal corridors
layered in spray painted exit signs tagged
by your night-wandering self to warn those
who venture hellward on a celestial quest
that the ceiling is about as firmly set as
your next errant footfall's twisted cankle
pain eruption for the walls are thickly 
enervated with resinous burls no longer 
swirling with the druzy sparkle of calcite,
your careful venture becomes a freefall down 
a pitch black shaft wondering if you should
clamp onto any edge you feel rushing by 
as the air grows heavy and unbreathable
you exhale to relinquish the last of what
does not belong here and open your eyes
to the glow of massive selenite symmetries
tongue lit with St. Elmo's salty tingle
a chemistry fired with an insufferable 
embrace, a transfiguration beyond mortality
to a greater commingling, every stone river
and creature captured in the Great Radiating 
Animation, simultaneously all and none but
one, unrobed and stretching across the 
silver spattered pool of nebulous spinning
in all directions at once captured in a self
immolation of knowing each curve and whisker
of the Beloved loving the Lover as its Beloved
loving with infinitely intelligible essence
and ardent eyes beckoning the lava to erupt
metamorphic lightning upon spermy proteins 
pooling pregnant with cosmogenetic vectors 
and I left to swim in the salty vents of
the undersea watching leviathans ever-birthing.
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©2025 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.