Winter Landscape
No difference between the snow and sky,
The mourning veil of disillusionment
Spread over everything: false green and blue
Entirely effaced, replaced by want
To drift through vast immaculate black space,
A pirate in the great canoe of God—
No mirror but each other’s nakedness,
Foredoomed to bliss, redeemed by brotherhood.
O freedom of appearances alone!
An ice floe in the Arctic sea, I am
As far away from youth as north from south.
And so I dive to seek the golden crown:
I’ll not return to dust, nor cease to dream,
But sail a fleet photon toward the truth.
The Nowhere Door
The way out is the way back in. I saw
The bluer candles of the nebulae
Illuminate the route with their sweet glow.
I fell away from false reality.
My flesh turned to bell-metal, rung by waves.
A shell game swapped the norm and the extreme.
I am not of this century of thieves.
I am not of this dead millennium.
A dying man among a dying race,
The key of numbers, helices in hand,
I am the first to finally make a choice:
On sensing that I am no longer bound
By universal law, the rules of chess,
I quit the monastery of my mind.
Christopher Bakka is a writer from Texas and Lambda Literary fellow whose work has appeared in Prelude, Asymptote, and Assaracus, among other places. He has also translated works by Arthur Rimbaud and François Augiéras from the French.