Originally published in Paper Moon Magazine vol. 4.
I've been thinking a lot about rivers lately.
The paths they take, their wandering limbs.
How forces drive their floating tides to carry wayward souls
adrift.
And I've been thinking a lot about eyes lately.
Pools that appear still at first glance,
But swell and crash against black cliffs towering over me,
silhouettes.
And my thoughts they cast away to feeling,
A dizzying tabernacle erected in your honor,
Seats reserved for your eminence, absent the grace.
This is why I speak in signs, in the hushed whispers
Of bodies writhing in motion.
No subtle notion of propriety binds me, tired as I am of
Moral absolutism in the face of exhaustive sobriety testing me,
Testing me,
Testing me.
Like I am some experiment that can be contained into a set of known values,
Like I am some tempest that given the right set of instructions,
Can be described without the word: salient
No animal looks upon the crushing forces of a hurricane and thinks to itself:
"O' storm! if only you were not of your nature!"
Birds take flight at the sight of me and yet here you plant your feet,
Thinking yourself wiser than those who flee,
Not realizing that there is wisdom in recognizing that
you are prey.
And these feelings they crash like waves,
Sending logic skittering from my locus of being,
Like a four-door sedan sharing a kiss with a freight train,
With an aftershock,
Drowning in emotion like an afterthought disappears
In the fluttering of wings,
In the shuddering glance of a touch,
In the depths of these eyes.
Bring what tithes you may, the wheels are already spinning,
And my, what webs you have found yourself wound in.
Sweet thing, having heard the coming of the storm,
You remained,
And now it is I that has been left with this final pity:
Burying what remains.