The discourse lies in the dust like fragments,

and I asked myself about beauty and freedom
and these golden wings I daily clip to keep myself grounded.

I dreamt that the Wind carried a whisper from someone's tears,
inviting me to lie in its ocean of hue and calm.
But dreams are a cripple that Jesus does not heal,
the epics of yesteryears when questions had no legs
and there was a peace we did not know,
the snow-soft bones of which trembled beneath the fragility of words.

Sometimes I wonder whether this human inside
is a phoenix, or whether the skeletons in my
closet, closed, clothe me in the cloths of colorful array
merely to invite these strangers to dance
in the moonlight obsession.

Are we the embrace before the sunset?
O lilac, riddle me this:
Did the blood turn violet yesterday on its own accord,
witch-like, this cackle on fire with hysterics,
when it seemed the shadows laughed
and I was the silence in someone's eyes?

a more human space.

"We were contented
with constant things, and stood there
in the interspace between world and toy."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Fourth Elegy"

***********

Let me say, old children,
let me say to the angel-crumbs,
as I flee to play
in the attics of dreams
and yesteryears,
that you, whom the angels embrace,
you who feel the hand of God
on your knee--

you are clay and kama
and I envy your buoyancy.

You age like a bottle of wine
in the belly of an unknown virgin,
you sing of the swelling ocean,
you are pirouette and hunger,

while I, cosmic astronaut,
orbit round Babylon and its whores,

I suck the marrow from the steeple
and spit the stained glass nativity in the offering plate,
I arrange the shards in patterns
that reflect the Virgin Mary and her gestation.

I weep over my thumb-sized spirit,
bruised from the slamming of Heaven's door.