5/10/2014

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.