Author: Michael Angelo

…and for a better world,
he peered through the window and into the cold,
seeing only the frozen blueness of the sky
and the thin brittle branches
of the barren tree that sits all icy winter
in the lot next door.

Like it, he now sits,
thinking about the spinning globe,
and the threads of fate that pull its inhabitants
this way and that way, to destinies unknown
and only revealed in the individual moment,
like the gold curtain of the sun
as it slowly drapes itself over one hill,
one plain,
at a time.

What is there to do
for the small things that live their lives upon
the warmth of a fleeting thing?

What is there for one to do,
but follow the ageless trumpeting of time
through the cold winters of the hour,
and pray that after the hard spell of frost breaks
one will rise as a full green bloom,

like the tree outside his window
when summer brings its love.

I thought I was cured—
that the squirming feeling in my stomach had stopped—

that it went to sleep along with the anxious
breath my lungs hide when I hear about a new house
bought, this marriage sealed, this baby
born—I wish
my years

would feel less like dreamed decades and more real—
that somehow my shredded apartment would be

a home,
but I’m still ill,

and get cold chills
when I see those tall sharp buildings and endless roads—
when I hear the clattering teeth of the talking human being

on stage, their words wet and thick with
the smothering future and
the market value of things
and the career trajectories of
people and the hard work involved…the vacation
plans and
retirement plans and
insurance plans and
health plans and
plans of plans and
plans and—I’m sick,

and my stomach is churning again,
but the schematics of my life refuse
to burn in the incinerator

no matter how high I turn up the flames.

Atop the fields that served as home
for the fragile flower of my love,

I stand as a ruined tower, dark
brooding, remembering
beauty’s smile—

now faded,

washed away by tides of time
along the edges of stony days.

High in my black sorrow,
I bear witness to cruel sight:
the unraveling of those sacred seams
that hold together the horizon.

Each loosened strand,
a kingdom felled;
each thread undone,
a country rent;
a good child born,
one man dead.

Leaves of every near and distant tree
lie like effigies of loss—

I, unable to bear
the sight of a fraying world,
turn my gaze away from its grey peaks—

and to the blue stars
I pray; they so full
of light, and joyful with eternity

—or so it seems,
to the short lived.

Consider
the countless stars that have dawned
and died
before the glow of our very Sun;

our Sun, alone and frightened in black deep space,
silenced and numbed
by explosions lived—explosions gone.

Light itself gutted—sprinkling

as ashes of death,
coalescing into my stone body;

a body that every day,
burdened by the overwhelming weight
of loss,

  sinks
deeper into ground,
to be forgotten,
like my love.

Within the chrysalis,
what once was known as
I
dissolves.

Particles of refracted light,
memories—

            A bus ride lined with blurry faces;
            a smiling silhouette—

all rays,
dying in a dimming den.

“Who am I now,” asks
who?

Legs a decayed milky dew.

An eye afloat
on flowing time, observing Eternity feast,
hours consumed.

Nothing then
everything.

Pain ruptures darkness,
a light seeping like sap, filling
space.

An abdomen churning,
a thorax curling,
first memories wake.

Silky remembrances harden
into delineations and limitations.

Welcome nascent
I.

Mind
thinks the first brightness
while its temples burn and split.

More pain, then breath,
and through muscles rip
petals—

Petals? What are petals?

No. These are wings.
They open—air at once seeps in.

A current
called yearning
carries me

towards flower or flame.