Ash Tray

"I am part of a pipeline-"

 

Mud fills my veins

Like cement in the mine of a memory
Or a winery where chalices are laced

With the salt of bodies and dead seas

And the salt of sweat in an iron bed

Where nightmares grow like bloodied daffodils

Under bullets for suns and ash trays for thrones

Oh cold sores, holes where the stars once prayed

Oh totem pole, now the color of a leper’s skin

Lonely, in the bone dust of an Iroquois village

Its shadow, my only favorite aftermath

Like hornets swarming in the ventilation of my sour mind

Leaving me as eyes under still water

Wanting breathe

Wanting feeling

Wanting nothing but the silence of a forever

Where I didn’t

I won’t

And I can’t exist

But somehow I’ve become a third person

A hymnal in a drain

A hydra of coiled madness

The smoke of a black candle

Higher than any god

Higher than any stained glass dream

And far above the bridge where my body kneels

Like a scabbed scarecrow on the last step of a gallows

With nothing left but a torn curtain and closure

The seizure of time, a knot in the yarn where old faces blossom

And my raw heart becomes a clock in peril

Watching the cards fold

And the road crumble into gearless motion

And my everywhere become a lion-red sand

Red as the skin of a closed mouth

Or a Norman shore, a Wounded Knee

A Vienna without scaffolding or operas or plagues

A house with walls of sheeted mirrors

And roofs that have never felt the kiss of stolen rain

And you, love, you come with lips soft as petals

With laughter like footsteps in a slow tide

And a touch like vineyard snow caught in the open basket arms of valley pines

Or clouds threaded through the eye of needled mountains

And you save me from the metal of this world

The metal of my hate

The metal of my swollen promise

A black matrimony I paid for myself

In skins, in lungs, in old and new words, in ink

A single want: to die-

To die and leave this all behind

Like a half-eaten apple in an abandoned garden

Where soundless music and virgin beauty echo without a pulse.

Reviews

[Legion]

Ah, no roman numerals. Cool.

This is spectacular. So many lines in this. Favorite is probably scabbed scarecrow/gallows bit.

It is the beginning of an ending. Brilliant wording. Brilliant work.