Tell me of this “no one” you
always refer to at your most darkest;
is she smitten by every speck of light,
or drawn back onto herself as a promise
folded back on itself?
Is she lustful of
romance, that sentiment so exquisitely
drafted by an almost
forgotten era & remolded by the decadents?
Is she mindful of the lasting jazz yet soaring today?
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, lost notes of improvisation,
sacred spells possessing the body as music does the snake
during its charm?
Has she fallen, an
angel whose wings were broken in flight
& has since stared
into the sky in her helplessness?
Or is it that she is lost? Possessing a map with no key,
no borders, written in an identified language, with no
desire to decipher any direction?
We can only be broken by a break we let fester in its
prolonged
semester & the
break that comes to all?
Is she wondrous of this, the break, the timelessness,
the motionlessness,
the de rigueur of iniquity so common in a life
spent staring at the
sky awaiting a comet eons out?
Does she harbor ill-wanting
to be well, to be healed,
freed of corrugated chains welded on her utter able fragile
wrists?
Or is it that being
held captive gives her the pause she needs,
the loiter she needs to
surrender against forward motion,
against swimming
against the tides?
-from [They Took it All Away]