A Year Ago Today

I wrote this. (06/08/08)
It's about death- as a transitory phrase, rather than a definitive statement.







"And I say, partridge to the pear tree-

Let your fight out against me,

Let's be inconsistent,

And let's do, struggle,

Die in flight, inside my chest.

Stay there, suspended in the space behind my ribs,

for I fear the moment that I cannot have you,

Even symbiotically.

(This is to say,the memory of you lives on inside of me.)


And hollow.

That is how I am embodied by you.

The sensation of floating in eppervescent nothingness,
And I am dizzy in some fantastic way

Center to the orbit of some magnificent thing;

Light,

And night,

And motor engines restrained underneath the caps of a thousand jet planes.

Roaring, a great symphony of escape,

Sounding like the snoring of your sleeping,

Sounding like the pillowcase crushing like little starched clouds beneath the weight of my lead head.

Sounding like the break of a wave into packed sand beneath my feet,

The sea of dreams- oh how bewitching- it's ebony and navy undulations.


And here,

I sink, and I- myself- am forgotten.

I- ourselves- get linked in the outreaching of our swimming fingers,

But perchance a dream, is my great awakening.




You are the sensation before rain,

The hot smell of vapors dancing with the moisture off the concrete.

You are the feeling of being sixteen,

Of being new and frightened by the world,

But brave, braced, and unfathomably apt to love.

You are waxy lined notebook paper,

Folded pocket creases,

And lines I will read a million more times before the day I exist no more.



What is death, anyhow,

I say with a smile, unfitting of my understanding,

or misunderstanding of the befallen ears which speak a different dialect than I.

What is death?, I say out loud now,

With a smirk, a laugh,

A translation lost in the static of my generation.

A wild reflection crept behind the surface of my eye-


What is death, darling-

But the turning of a page?


And in due time,

It will be turned.

I fear not what lay beyond it,

For I know it is you.

I fear not what I will learn in the absence of my acquired knowing,

Because, at peace, we will be.


Tired wings and acoustic melodies,

Strung up on some distant favor,

Dangling by and by,

Drunk on the lucidity of our childhood prayers.