The Cloud Merchant

'Enfant des noirs minuits'

In silent expectation 

On a night's isolation insupportable, 

I wait and watch the coming storm, 

Poised in exasperation, 

Like a lost soul throwing themselves from a cathedral;

Into any hapless uncertainty

I cast my lot uncaringly, 

A half-soul turned soldier, off to a new war

To die willingly.

'There is no life without you. 

You are my world,' 

Someone breathed into the abyss

Of this wretched war, 

The sound lost in the clatter of emotion and confusion, 

Reverberating against the ashen walls with a hiss.

I am the only one that hears it, 

I that said these words once,

Musing on it not unlike a Carnival master

Screaming and beckoning his clowns to dance faster, 

I that would sooner summon demons 

And the unholy Queen of them!

Like Faust preferring his wayward folly

Than suffering another day in idle drudgery, 

I that am mad, a cursory sketch of the accursed. 

In a sea of acridly opportunistic

Actors and clones, 

I only feel at home in a storm

Where the waves and winds batter the stones, 

Like a banished aristocrat 

Building palaces out of cloudy skies

And misty horizons, 

An ostracized merchant of phantoms, 

Belonging nowhere and wishing to be nowhere else

Than among the ether and madcap dreamthings