On Partially Infected Twilight

Hibernating kettle fish
as torrent
as kindled foment
springing from solar darkening

not as alabaster syntax
or a tree no longer as spindle
or calibrated ruin
or Azure crystal

but higher form as mesmerization
as arcane leakage
as silicate preamble
never summons as debilitated stalactificatiom

or by bleak yet circuitous formation perhaps this is highest maze by kindled perhaps by chrysanthemum foilage
as beckoning by dilemma
perhaps a purposeless diorama

aghast as preamble
being sparkling grenadine pebbles that explode
by crystallized gestation
this being flux by matrix

as ironic power by bitterness
being explosive monoran
forming itself by abstracted gait
being blizzard by stalactite by silicate
by trans-human form

perhaps
insidious sheaf by lizard
kindled by infected twilight
by sonic global etching
akin to disrupted opal
akin to grainy galaxies that rivet


Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics. Alexander’s books include Asia and HaitiThe Sri Lankan LoxodromeCompression and PuritySunrise In ArmageddonDiary As SinInside the Earthquake PalaceTowards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. He was a 2022 Pulitzer Finalist for his poetry book Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021). He lives in The City of Angels.