Restless With The Dead Tonight
Relying on the stars to do for me
what I can't do for myself. Pull me out
of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of
on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,
butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon's mouth,
a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.
Down to the musical instruments of my bones.
Flutes and drumsticks. But I'm void-bound,
trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,
liberate the chains I can feel but can't see,
numbed by having to say no
when all I want to do is say yes
over and over again to the picture-music
to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,
the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery
wherever it leads, whatever occurs,
be so fully here, I don't exist, not even
as a witness, and be nothing but the listening. Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,
Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,
the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.
Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash
back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,
walking in my place, face covered with ashes
of a man-shaped urn that's avoided me for a while.
The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.
Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear
without worrying about what I'm coming back to
or who'll be waiting for me when I do
to tell me while the idiocy of this languor
has got its hands on my throat, I should learn
to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,
live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,
give up this discipline of doing nothing
as if mere being were a form of worship
though to what is anyone's guess and why
is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself
the way the stars make me guess their names
peering through the crowns of the trees,
dissociated from the features of their mythologem.