Michael Angelo Poetry


Author: Michael Angelo

  • Exhale, Inhale

    Exhale, Inhale

    This very breath

                 is the life that births leaves.

                These very leaves in evening breeze

    is life that fills me.

  • Membrane

    Membrane

    I woke up to the light of the sun,
    and it revealed all mysteries.

    In a flash, I knew the meaning of a flower,
    it was there in its scent
    and in the pressure of its fine hairs on my skin.

    The sea of my thoughts had parted
    and in its place flooded the sea of sense;
    my ears rumbled
    when I rested on a nautilus,
    and my tongue rolled along with grains
    of salt speckled waves.
    …  

    I’m shouting into the air—
                       shouting
                             I have found it—
    the meaning of shouting!

    It is the air, bare
    to the lungs as they squeeze
    to grasp every drop of light and water.

    It is that wanting, that losing,
    and the prayer that then rises

    from the valley to stoke
    every branch on the bluffs
    with flame,
    and casts every shadow away
    from every corner of stone
    in the wake
    of its journey to the peak of the sky.

    Now I smile to it
    before my return to night
    and the dream of undivided things.

  • A Friend

    A Friend

    We are all dying
    and because of this I want to hold your hand.

    Each day,
    we are dying.

    Each
    day
    I want to hold your hand.

    Can’t you see,
    the shining towers of gold
    are illusions in the sand.

    The stones are melting
    and the heat fades with the land.

    We are dying, my friend.
    Hold my hand.

  • Ragnorok

    Ragnorok

    There is snow in my lungs
    and though I try to warm my breath
    by inhaling the sunbeams of the day
    I seem to only speak an icy bitterness.

    I used to dream
    of singing, of adding to the world notes of amber gold,
    but after seasons of unchanging season,
    winter has set itself within my bones.

    My vocal cords are frozen,
    dead shores along white coasts,
    waves encased like barreling wails,
    burning to break forth.

    They rage in me like blizzards,
    covering wood and stone in crystal,
    coated tears shed by shaded people crumbled
    in unlit hearths,
    and whose pains crackle in my ears.

    To hear! Oh, to hear, loneliness so pure
    that on its edge I see my image clear,
    and to know! Oh, to know, that even those I hate
    carry the same faceless frigid fears.

    Is this humanity’s condition?
    Doomed to days and deaths,
    to wander in the storm,
    white-eyed and blind—

    Am I,
    with small body and fragile mind,
    to inhale every sour flake that curdles sky?

    If so, I am a miserable host
    because my words seem not to melt
    or shatter ice,
    and there is an iceberg enormous
    lodged deep within mankind.

    But the sea is wide,
    and if I can continue—

    continue sailing by star instead of sight,
    then along the strips of sun I’ll cast my faith
    and set to life
    an ember in my chest—

    in whose smallness rests the end
    of permafrost.

    And should it grow—

    grow to rage like bead of flaming blood in cold,
    then with frostbit hands I’ll grasp

    my voice,
    thaw the chords,
    draw its breath—

    and with full stretch
    of lungs and heart

    I’ll break apart the walls
    with a song of avalanche.