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the thing is: you must stop defining
yourself by what you have lost, stop waiting here for the air to explode. tonight sweet Night readies her tender meal of absentmindedness for you the trees outside sigh, grown weary of hosting your jackleg crucifixes. quit struggling upriver into smaller and smaller streams that don't fit you. be swept down into the sea where your dreams have room to get lost, wave-tumbled, ravaged and salt-tongued until you cough up another language and your footprints are extinguished like tired stars. whoever the whale spits out will be given a new name. whoever gets lost in the mountains will return in the company of tigers. whoever drops his burden of stone in the torrent spites his exhaustion into the shape of a bridge. pay attention as the fire dies low sinks capsizing
into its crisp whimpered embers and night hovers a downside-up invisible angel expecting something of you. it is time; you've been anointed with flame your plebian excuses all gone scurrying off or flown. tonight you've wrestled up all the stones sinkers you stuffed in your pockets for the last year and some you've been schlepping around so long so precious so familiar as familiar as would your own bone broken and protruding through your thigh. too many to hurl off into one night to be held by one night and its pushpins of stars. god knows with them you could build a staircase to Mars or worse places. god knows you'll die wearing them like toy-capsule vending machine trinkets or shrunken heads and the weight will draw down your sad flesh to the iron-bound Earth's core. enough with this futility-- surrender takes many forms, its least angel the major league pitcher whose ballpark busting throw you aspire to so much. Monet painted sweetly in the heft of his quickening blindness bluesmen carved music from lead-strung instruments chain-balled to the grave and a thousand lousy drunks have been medaled & made love to for poems less sincere than this one. even the perfect airbrushed gods are half-jackass (they who made us in their own image out of monkeys). we carry what we carry until, simply, we no longer carry it or no longer are. in the mean time you're allowed-- a jot against the stone-sinewed age of this cornucopia earth whose sun will burn and burn and fail and die too someday--it's about balancing the fulcrumed weight on the task of shadow sculpting slick with hands of shadow, the careful drawing down and down sheets of tender light against your hunchback silhouette until and until and again and again you see and see against the dying fires forged and spent: the shape of your own wings. |
Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
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Unless otherwise noted, all content ©Paul-William Gagnon, Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs license.
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