the fury scattered sheets of glass in which she fell to sleep
to consummate this mental compass, guiding dreams to nothing,
these passions scored and bled from every wall
to mark new shadows, to note great pitch, a method
of emptiness and freedom, these are the cliffs
of her vivid calculation: our truth
is a blinding force of cage in cage in cage,
this apartment like a whale, this room the stomach,
this skin the lock, and death
some pure, radiant key . . .
such fashions are not meant to be perceived,
belonging to a breath as it withdraws from the world
and the eternal calamity burnished in stones. but she sees
the bottom of the well, she craves this open wound
of all forces, striving at once, together: a fragrant, lucid hurricane
of the senses, it is in her blood, rushing the angles
of her walls, and she begins to understand:
her second chance – this spiritual decay.
now, beyond the dreamless shores
she walks alone beneath no sky, she reaches nothing,
going nowhere, her memories like relics buried in a reef,
and that is all.
so she searches all the desperate days:
wind-burned landscapes she once stood before
the hands of men had carved such dunes
of her desert. there was a time
when one glance she shared could turn
the hour-glass converse, and all the sodden skies
she’d known wore false as flesh. but still, time
continued, as though it never had a purpose,
and as the moments slowly chipped the color
from her hair, each fresh tear burned a little more,
the crimson flavor of nectar dulled into metal,
and she executed her vows, one by one,
until, broken by despair, she surrenders
to the fury of a broken mirror, pours herself
like a poet on the walls, cries out against
all the fevers of her desire and falls, all exhaust
and spirit, all the same, drunk on her screams,
poisoned by time, to herself and her truth:
she was a waste.
but when the sunlight breaks
like a language through borders
of silence and windows, she wakes.
she remembers nothing, and yet she climbs
again from her ancient wounds. she explores
the fabric of water, the scent of the season
as it crushes her dismal world
with light.
she smokes a cigarette under a barren tree in the park.
she meets a man with a beard of cinders who makes her smile.
she plucks a flower from its grave and offers it
to a child walking his dog.
she watches the sky in its impenetrable glory.
she breathes, and continues,
and for a time,
she is happy.