Listen to poem:
Cartography of Meliorism
Written: June 04, 2026, for a contest sponsored by Bob Carmack
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Horizons spun on a cosmic loom of distant empires,
Egypt sleeps as a sunken palimpsest—
a robed codex . . .
crumbled vellum, papyrus, river silt,
and raw glyphs dwelling in the hollows of her ribs.
I limned their faded faults
with a fingertip of anamnesis,
each stroke a specter-sketch—
a laconic lexicon buried in the chest,
the one script I cannot utter aloud.
Your chasms of ire, cataracts coruscating
under a veneer of citrine-ness—
you felt like the Nile: languid, imperious,
with arcs of medieval thirst mapping your torrent . . .
Sanctuaries swelled inside the fissures of your silence;
Cleopatra-obelisk monoliths
monitored the rhythm of your breath.
Demons—fledgling, caterwauling—
nested on lintels, rehearsing to be celestials.
Polarity here is not an orphic strife,
but a sacred cartography where shade and glare mesh—
twin shores of one spate,
a ductile fulcrum of fact and will.
The cosmos swings on a single opus, a sacred seam—
Empyrean seamstress welding dusk to dawn.
A coruscation of orbs morphs into a map
that hardens into an iron covenant.
I stumbled over a synapse in a bare tomb at noon—
a sudden brain-scorched desert firing.
Primal petrichor broke the century-long drought.
Kaleidoscope giggles—multivocal, bright—
shattered our creed of molten limestone,
where liturgical laughter loops,
a sacerdotal scrawl from a raw soul.
Cuddle or cringe, choice is not specious but fertile,
a stalwart swarm of sequent sequels.
You taught us to dread desire
and chase chimeric vibes at every sight.
Campfires amid night gloom waltzed
as sun and moon—silky, serene.
In the sand, our swollen steps linger
as oxidized fossils of fever and faith.
Each sharp scythe on the sifting floor
breaks wheat from tare—
leaving name-skeletons heaped, bones in shifting sands.
Awe of each thorn, each stinging prickle—
astonishing mentor—
hubris dulls pain with its seraphic sanity.
An angry lover’s fist scars the shrine,
a futile votive deed.
Even cruelty is a grim cousin of caress.
Accept that joy may be earned, not whim—
a hunger that lasts.
Meliorism manifests as a magic map,
that we often entomb.
Wander over ruins, letting your love shine
as a diaphanous, dazzling obelisk—
casting a long, honest shadow on the shore.
Let Egypt be the ultimate compass
in a world of epochs,
with its inked cartouches, fulgid dawns,
and the sluggish, boundless river that recalls us all.
Anger and love are similar to a map—
a landscape is imprinted in our fossils,
even after you pleat it.
Egypt with her rain, and stillness,
still spells her cryptic mysteries.
The sacred map was never in the sand.
It was embedded in our nucleus—
waiting for the celestial glow,
We dared to read it.
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