Ocean Within

Perhaps choice is only slight of hand and God plays dice after all.  Perhaps lamentation is the ultimate spinning of the wheel and grace has nothing to say to those who won't accept the offering. Time only slows in dreams like these, making deals with Devils who refuse to collect on all the bad checks I've been writing.  It makes me nervous when mercy feels like damnation and the damned walk free through the channels of chaos.

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

I can feel myself slowing

in the wake of warmth

dripping up from dreams cannibalized

for want of a solution to the gauntlets

my fathers abandoned so many times over. 

I hear the cries of women left

to burn in the fire of life giving

and lifting all but themselves

in the robes of cotton itching

at the well-worn flesh of motherhood. 

I thought I saw you as well,

but the deliberate hymn of age

hasn’t yet ripened your remorse

the way that time will one day fall short

of its own pounding into our loveless release. 

Would I dance this song again

if it played at just the moment

you brushed my forearm

with a glance of fresh redolence? 

Do you know the secret

to my perennial unrest? 

I pray for another way to lift

above the moon-enslaved tides

that wash me home in the morning. 

Make me a stranger

in some unfathomable land

beyond the edges of the earth. 

Give me more than I could have imagined

in the smothering folds

of the Eden I have left behind.

The splitting of my armistice wills away those pungent reminders of how many times it rusted into the sulfur soaked poetries of lies you wanted to hold into the morning.  I could’ve made the dark rekindling abandon hope of refute, but it was so out of sync with the dew falling down the drainpipes, like a song held out of key flowing backwards in time.  It busted the markers of pretty soap dish fishing rods, and hugged the candle flame left in the pencil sketch dormant away.

Walking through the sunlight of a longing cried out as the breaths of turning inward and over moved between the sky and you.  You were a million different ways of loving and knowing.  You were the turning of the wheel of all that was to become our lips grazing. 

"Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide."

• Howard Zinn on War (2000}, Ch. 21: "Just and Unjust War"

I tittered in the night glow from the factories littering our trees.  I let the flow unrest my spine in anticipation of some new holding I might have found.  But the fairytales I mistrusted all turned out to be true, and I stand exiled from them.  The dreams I recorded got washed away in your average rainstorm.  I shouldn’t have written all my poems on sugar cubes and expected them to last.

I learned to mistrust the wisdom of my elders, who offered advice but had so little to show for their struggles.  I drifted past the nuclear treadmills to wallow in the sunlight and the mineral-soaked earth.  For a while, it smelled of freedom. Did I think I was the first to fall upon my knees to the seduction of the sun? Escape becomes a bond when the last laugh fades into the sinking of your hemorrhaging lover.  I am stripped of all the kisses I once showered down on their sleeping faces.

I know how it is on the other side of this headache.  You followed me down beneath my blushing unrest.  But I just might do some damage on my way out of things seen at room temperature.  I’m tossing around our wordplay with enough barbarism to avoid your softer parts.  I can feel you reach for me from clear across town, but you still don’t know where I live.