The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
The Evanescence-Agnosticism of the Aesthetic Urge

Is it the painter dabbing his gouache upon the corpse
or the hundred-years-late custodian's touch that
unleashes orpimental flakes from the coffin's wall
and melts castiron into nosegays of vivianite?

For what is erosion but death revealing its impermanence
causality waxing to a regathering of the December moons
yet even the flourish of the antibrush lingers in the eye
a kaleidoscope of mushroom luster glinting in yesterflown noons

This is the secret beneath our forum of the tyrian clothed 
the hidden urge for chupacabras to drain us of our carmine dreams
where no quiet geometries disrobe their unshamed countenance
and pretend to spy no filthy trough of prison mortared verdigris

The admirals of alabaster sail upon a brittle shoreline
bleed milky tears of joy upon a reflected revelation 
while the dark lords churn their tar to curds of bitumen
and carve from the jet of carbonado, acanthus laurel horns

And somewhere long spun rock crystal finds its amethyst point
from the soft-spoken brush of botryoidal irradiations
and our euphoria is silenced by the masquerade of evidence
stumbling upon its own metamictic zirconic senescence

The cerated coastline uneroding from sinusoidal bliss 
is freedom found in the sober of tomorrow's unreveling
calculus consuming non-linear algebras of byzantine matrices
ossifying to diamond made dunes of dialectical instabilities

Said I to We, behold our communion of angel macabre 
and the seven symbol hierarchies of staircase waterfalls 
cutting into the idyll fields of patinated petraglyphs,
here shall the milk flow into the honeyed eye and so 
denude death's flowing locks with the rain of virgin cry.
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