ministrant angel

ministrant angel, come down on me
rain down your judgment in a heavenly fire

lock up my body in your flame lock it up
hold me down to draw out the human rot--the coating push

of original sin--thrust it through me
thrust out of me the evil in a sound of fire


play my flesh as if it were a drum
something so base to glorify god

fray my nerve-endings with your golden wires
unstring my veins and retune me in flame

resound in me with your celestial harmony
until the black pit of me is charred to nothing

but the echoing

the echoing of
a celestial strain

sequence: "everlong"

meditations on the impossibility of your eyes

1. your eyes know things.  they create the world out of your image.  the things i could tell you, the things i could say--the things i would tell you i knew that you know.  your eyes see no shadows, just objects, just the movement of what is, light or dark, each thing drawn

like the earth to the sun

to serve your purpose.


2.  the things i could bear witness to, the things i see in you
watching

just watching

you walk among warm cities, leveling them to plains
pulsing under the sun
of your gaze
sands shifting in the wind
of your
wet
blink

a thousand years of decay
in one soft close

soft as a breath
fallen from my mouth.


3. and so you create
you destroy

so you create
you destroy

easy, gentle
as a sigh

but giant as the sun
in its pale sky

the eyes of your face
usurp me
i could tell you such things
were they not
in the end
nothing--
what i saw
matters nothing
within the drawn breath
of your gaze.


4. don't release me.


5.  i am not ready to go,
god--

i am not ready
to be blind against
the only thing i see
from shadow.

i will be
your simulacrum--
i will be leveled
as low
as flesh can go.

sequence-form: schuman fantasie in C Major first movement

1.
the heart knows what it
wants              even in defiance
of an object.

i have made myself
sick        on the idea
of your face

but i did not
know you
from adam.


2.
i am wondering
in my slow way
if this makes you lonely,

to be
abandoned
to the garden of my mind

where everything
in the blue moonlight
has turned        to seed.


3.
oh my love
oh my love
on whom

can i pin you?
within what restless        wind tunnel

can i
fix your echo?

within what can i divine you?


4.
i looked at my shadow
in the rush of water

the water had come down

a mountain--the stream had
swelled

against itself

i saw the brief false indent
my shape had made

against the light on the water.


5.
vanesa you left
a room inside my heart
i closed it off to you

grateful and angry
to have felt       something

with a name as distinct

as that of love.

time wore down
the walls        until
the tiniest rekindling within them

burned them away.

heart, what will you do now?

heart, how will you ever learn?