Will Cordeiro

Lucubrations

The bulb above my head swings on a hook,
out-casting luring shadows cross the room
where lately I have dusted-up on books
until my skull feels cratered as the moon.
I read toward some secret center, off  

into my gloom.  Shades blot each care.  I pause
discerning every line—to no avail,
my errand gazing past a crux of gauze
where tremors in a mirror flair and fail,  
dream-dark from wings of one tremendous moth.

Ars Longa

In the cold garbage-heap of night, the wind
teases out something like terror from among the leaves:
but quieter, not as final as the moment’s urgent
evasion of always giving us what we never want: the rest
may say life is prose, but a few will press an instant
until it bursts with song.  Before his death, Socrates learned one
last melody on the flute.  The useless waste of it, the old
fingers still so inscrutably simple and right . . . It is late.
The moon is lost.  The sun is made of cheese.

Will Cordeiro has worked as a NYC Teaching Fellow, a staff writer at the theater magazine offoffonline, and an assistant editor of Epoch.  He has an MFA in poetry from Cornell, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying 18th century British literature.   He is also the co-founder of Brooklyn Playwrights Collective and have had several plays produced in regional and off-off-Broadway venues, including a libretto performed at the Johnson Museum of Art.  For two years he has  have been the Artist-in-Residence at Risley Residential College.  Will has also received residencies from the Provincetown Community Compact, Ora Lerman Trust, and Petrified Forest National Park.