after-thoughts on winter skulls,
disfigured, blue flamingo
cadaver-fields pecked clean by clouds;
welcome, hollow stones
floating in our drowned mouths,
willow roots and organ veins,
iron glazed with sun, long tracks for trains,
a humble crimson bird
granted my cradle, nestled
her neck, turned with her shoulders
through the nest of my palm.
there were words
exchanged i never knew could come
so close.
inspiration once meant
simply to breathe,
but cities flicker far too fast,
the poison of the passion
of the pieces you see fit but cannot reach
to fasten to freezing window stares,
knowing you are a gap
of yourself, black against every note
you meant to sing;
the crashing rain torments your lesion, but never fills
the rooms of pale-clad ghosts
locked in padded rooms, never fills
the line of light from one finger
cracking the shell of that black bed room,
stirring me from my birds, shone
her, bare and searching, her back
facing me, her collar bridging the flood
of words left long in detailed lines
where her body met the lamps, her body met the space
i traveled every day i never had her
again,
she breathes under these same stars,
she flies from nook to branch, daring love, daring solace,
daring distance once unknown.
after-thoughts
know fables of our sadness, petals blown from Eden speak:
“all distance was once sadness, all sadness once ourselves,
along the line
all seas once distance,
until, met with moons, we wept it to being:
all ballets, all arts, all questions
spent, exhausted true tears
into distance; Atlantic hymns
now lost in sighs, tides, surf.
so starved
again we return to where we gave
the long breath of our lands up for movement,
where our fingers scale silk forms
passed in foam, our eyes return to where we fall,
at the foot of our sea, we reach, we kiss, we inspire.”