I am waiting to breathe
Waiting to die until I can see
A watery horizon,
The layers of wizened
Peel off under the sun
I want to feel the ocean
Smell the salt water in my face,
Listen to its metered race,
Crescendo, crash and rescind,
The passion of the end
Building a new beginning
Each wave brimming with eternity,
and release.
Each night he takes him in his hands
The lump of cold, dead stone
And he winds him up, and winds him up,
So we are never alone.
And I hear him ticking, ticking, ticking
Across the empty space between us,
Like a tyrant laughing, laughing, laughing
Forever undefeated
Reminding me each second
of the victories he’s wrought
When we thought all battles ended,
And no wars again be fought
This timeless wonder in his palm
Splits seconds, so divisive.
He laughs, he ticks, he gloats
Unceasingly derisive
And I am wild to visit harm
Upon that little metal piece
To end his reign, to end his lie,
To give us some release.
Wild to pierce his skin, and smash his face,
To rip out all his sense-
Oh, the damage I could wreak
Would all be self-defense!
Curtains billowing in the breeze
Like a woman’s cotton dress
Frolicking around her knees;
Currents carried on a cool caress
To soothe the heat of day.
Green life emerging from its death,
The winter-buried clumps of sod;
Decay and rot, smothered breath,
Renewed again by the hand of God,
Working through His appointed seasons.
There is a wildness in me
An ocean in a bottle
With a moist cork, I see
I stand a suppressed model
Of practicality,
Revving for full throttle
But for the wake of brutality
And all forgot, all
Sacrificed to creativity,
But there is something wild in me
And still it grows, and still I thirst
For open fields, and free
Paints, and notes, and words
And time and space to feed
What be the best or worst
Or wildest escapee-
All unheard, and all unversed,
La Pensée Sauvage will be.
How tremulous are the times,
These smooth faced crimes
We cultivate as pets
Feeding crumbled regrets
Until our hands are stained bare
Our ignorance declares
Our bloodthirsty guilt.
We are born to wilt,
Screaming wild from the womb
Against our descent to the tomb
Fascinated with all that lies beneath,
Sheep with carnivorous teeth
Tearing at the soft flesh
The crave and the thirst enmesh
And each entanglement, syrup sweet
And each digestion, a mortal defeat.
On our mounds of filth, we stand
Making worship, inherently hand in hand,
An abstraction we practice alone
Bowing at our own thrones
Bowing, but never to sit
Playing the king, but unfit
To reign.
You reign
Holy and blameless
Ever shameless
Even against our mess,
This howling failure to confess
And repent, and consent to life.
Taking the enemy for wife
Restoring order to the disjointed
Renewing Your anointed
Who were the worst of the lot.
So stuck on me
And all I am
Is the static between stations,
White noise vibrations
The matrix between cells,
The void that fell
Between occupied spaces,
Lost and lacking graces,
But for Your face turned to see me.
I make nothing
I offer nothing, I am nothing
But what I’ve always been,
A tiny bundle of blood and sin,
Crying out in the field I’m thrown,
No suckling, no home
Until You cradled me near
You – all I love, and crave, and fear
And betray, and hold dear.
I’m tossed under the night sky
And every burning star
Is a light left on for me,
To guide me home, to see
You still care
Not that I’m impaired,
But that I’m still Yours
You – setting my course
And sustaining the force of my momentum.
Am I fundamentally the same I have been?
If this is the wind-down into the end,
What has remained, and what has been changed,
And what should be changed again?
Have I done all that I could do,
All that only I could do?
Or do I pass the flame, less my name,
Along to someone new?
Am I a pitcher pulled from mound,
Or did I make the final inning?
There are a thousand ways to stop a race,
But only one of them is winning.
I miss the night-summer air
Electric against my skin,
Breathing in, and then exhaled
With no pain in the taking
And mischief in the excess
Making a tapestry of mess
We weathered with our youth
Our bad decisions
Uncouth in our derision
Wild in our eager anticipation
Of whatever lay open
In our next breath.
I miss the world unroofed
And untamed
While I was still unchanged
By creature comforts.
Three years, she said, three years
And now I wait
For some intangible moment to pass
As though the hourglass of fate
Encased the same number of grains
For us all.
Three years of neither here, nor there
But always in between,
Time is a lucid dream, and I choose
To wander the halls of it,
To refuse to wake until I’m called
Into its heart.
Three by three, I’ve come
These eleven strides
And my pride is too strong
To stand aside, to let me dream
A brand new dream;
To let the old dream die.
viewingcamelot 