Solar Sinai
for Gregory Corso
Joshua Corwin
I.
Sun drip into a weary willow abyss
Clenched-fist generation peers into blindness
Another generation pierces blindness
And when the world gave me thunder
You stood upright and said, No!
Homeless sun spilling over dreams,
echoing stars stark
drenched in wet dark,
naked life-imprisoned beams
Sun rip across the highway!
Cradle yourself, on your knees!
Go down, Sun! Go down!
II.
Sun, why are you so cruel,
rapacious—
Tonight, you are so golden
And there is nothing but flames—charcoal towers
O sun, why do you count
dead blessings and laugh? Woe is opening me up
I want to burn you—but I
need ice
And I’m already frozen by heart in quicksand woe
You, Sun.
I want to bury my head in
stars, be frozen like a
ghost awaiting chains, but
the dead can’t treat
themselves to heaven dharma dead in the flow
when you are burning up eschewing flowers
O sun, why do you encircle echoes
rainbows and all things don’t matter when you’re
calm and peaceful, heaven is just mud to me and
acquiescence—I am so over the lies I taught you
tired, so tired of these lies and hope
Flames! O sun! Why can’t
you just let me be blind on
my own time? Why must
you shove your embers down the do-nothing—
down my throat and singe into the weeping—
My face shadowing woe and why—
O sun, you are dark devouring and still divine
lightning and I can’t
appease your soft allure of
insanity! O sun, where have
they taken you? I want you and all your lies
Sun, I want you and I need nakedness bathing
You. I need your dead skin opening bloodshot
fire.
O sun—fuel-engine-rip apart free
Disaster! I want to shine, open up heaven, shine
your eyes out with ocean
And bliss, ending in a slow and broken SCREAM
Silent assonance or a view
from heaven where I’m at the crossroads of Earth
Cloaked in god and god is TOO NAKED TO BE
a rainbow and I don’t WANT TO WIELD YOU,
know how to speak—how TO EERIE ERUPT
to remember—how to be
anything but a prayer, a WOE MAKER
prayer shone from
darkness, down my WOE MAKER
window, up the flight of
stairs, across the endless WOE STREAM
river, dripping droplets, BEND MY LIE, BEND
My body beaming bright UNTRUTH! TEARDUST
and brilliant, but it is sun AND YOU ARE HOPELESS
and I’m part of your TRIAL, O YOU SICK, SICK! SICK!
sick flames and we’re just SICK AND DEWDROPPING
burnt up in this sick heaven
I CAN’T FACE THE FACTS AND LET PEACE BE TAME
so why bother to chant
your name. You’ll always
burn up into NEVER.
A place where I cease to
Cry.
Joshua Corwin, a Los Angeles native, is a neurodiverse, 2-time Pushcart Prize-nominated, Best of the Net-nominated poet and Winner of the 2021 Spillwords Press Award for Poetic Publication of Year. His poetry memoir, Becoming Vulnerable (2020), details his experience with autism, addiction, sobriety and spirituality. He has lectured at UCLA, published alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti and read with 2013 U.S. Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. He hosts the poetry podcast “Assiduous Dust,” writes the weekly “Incentovise” column for Oddball Magazine and teaches poetry to neurodiverse individuals and autistic addicts in recovery at The Miracle Project, an autism nonprofit. Joshua Corwin is online at JoshuaCorwin.com.