DrawingSongbird

In searching eaves for colored leaves
for the fitting season had fallen,
I came upon the musk of morn
Betwixt the rosebush thorns.

Before the blight to darkened eyes
Climbed the broad horizon--
A coldness, sweet damp,
The cling of moistened blade.

My feet were bared to nature
Skin like raw from sleep;
I found the calm of clarity's dawn
A fair yet vile beast.

Such drops of dew do come from night
Who lends all tired souls their sighs.
In the dead of fire,
In time's great sour,

What glory could those jewels inspire
Without the pass of darkest hour?

Baptism

    It seemed so chaotic, the pattern of her hand. Like a maze, or a burlap sack fashioned from soft leather. She would sometimes wonder about the meaning tied between her intricate hands to the webbings of her thoughts, and become lost, as if caught in the sticky fibers, and trapped in the confusing mess of a genealogical labyrinth.
    She had a thousand thoughts per second, it seemed to her, and a very disorganized system with which to sort the assortment. Too many perspectives from which to ponder her decision to drink coffee this morning, or watch the first ten minutes of the morning’s news before abruptly finding something more productive to do in splitting the dead ends of her hair.
    How could routine become a memory? She had lived such a life that rooted and amalgamated every cincture of her person into the wants of others, that to be free seemed to imply also being lost. Cut away from the word of God by the substitute that promised immediate salvation. In a whirl she had found herself standing on the grounds of a university in Dublin, Ireland. Some niggling of pride had etched itself into her eyes, remembering her ears relating to her the words that promised such a distance and such a life impossible.
    The sight and the fresh promised dirt and lime green grass washed over her, as if to shed from her weary body the names and diseases that had consumed her life before.

No Body is a Promise

    Say we live in a house with mom and dad and brother, brother, and brother. Mom makes sure the food is cooked and her children are hers, while Dad makes the money and hides away. Brother works and brother works, and brother goes to school, goes to school and ignores with all his mind the pain and the rot. The impassible wall of indifference, and the mountains of disdain stand by as ancient reminders, chronic disease, never to bruise deep enough on the surface for the world to realize. It’s all working out. Life is never getting any better, and your heart remains just as shredded and lonely. Just as vulnerable to the hands of strangers. You’re not strong enough to carry it alone because it’s grown so painfully heavy in your chest, malignant as tumors in your weary arms and legs and chest.
    Say teacher, teacher. Teacher made sense. Teacher, teacher. Took the truth from trusting mouth and commanded begone. Woman grabbed at hearts and stuck them in pockets full of dirt, turned them into vacant, disturbed Picasso’s blue guitars. Woman and mother and brother, dear brother. Spit in your paintings, burned the guitar’s fake handle. Leaving you charred and brittle as glass, alone with strangers and the sickly sting and stench of death.
    Say you live in a court, with brother, brother, brother, mother and father, to be judge, judge, and sold-out jury. Say we, you, maybe I too, have no name. Throw away the meager respect for family and humanity, or give it to them, and say it’s theirs. God knows that all your life it’s never been yours. Painted black, and painted blue, as the coldest of endless nights to the daunting, infinite universe ahead. No one knows the eternal names stamped in your soul for God alone to understand.

A breath caught in the air. Wicked winds and bursting clouds of glory and dreams that plume and grumble from the ashes and fire that propel the exhaust. Heaven-bound. The sky, greedy, pulling it up as if by a string, embraces it amidst disbelief, jeers, and cheers. Flying, flying as if the weight of the world were on the shoulders of shadows.

Drenched. Quiet. Soaking in emptiness. We'd been misunderstood for the understanding they lack. Only to be wrung out in the next storm.