Sonnateers 365

E-Day 130: For the Absence that is Born

It’s not forgetting that you want
but rather a selective remembering
as if cognitive dissonance was something
you could conjure up to comfort you
like a warm cup of tea.

I remember your mind
free from such self-destructions, in love
with truth and beauty as so many
young minds are.
Was that foolish of us? Seeking
to understand the world with
no compromises? Except time itself
is a compromise. So we lost each other
upon the realization that losing ourselves
was our entirety.  

E-Day 129: For Every Touch

He hurls himself through your side
of the church’s sanctuary, defying
anything like spiritual boundaries
between your bodies. He wants
to combine his sins with yours
as if in doing so the two of you
will cease to be alone. There is only
so much you can do for each other
and as the wall come down you resolve
to do it because how else can you
ever hope to find your way home. 

E-Day 128: For Pure Exhaustion

Smells of mouthwash and tobacco
are captured indiscriminately in the old woman’s diary.
The world asks her why she keeps one, deluding herself
into thinking her age has remained relevant.

Maybe it will be burned
upon her death and no one will know
just where the tobacco smell came from,
lingering in her house like the poetry
of a dead lover. No one will ask why
it smelled of mouthwash when it’s been seven years
since she lost her teeth.

Are stories like this bad luck,
waiting to deconstruct our years until we are only
books to burn? One day I will be blind
and have only the scent between pages
to inform me of the world’s revolutions.

So dictate them to me, lost soul
wandering so near death it aches
your empty gums. Dictate them to me
before all the useless books are burned.

E-Day 127: For Visionary Power

He has a headache from jumping
on his bed, trying to imitate
Newton’s falling apple. This is why
his homework lies neglected on his desk,
not that he cares, but in this moment

he will either discover gravity or fly,
both significant feats for a child.
He is in love with velocity, and yes
the headache is a throbbing force
of monstrous thunder, but why
shouldn’t this be the voice of God or genius?
Why shouldn’t a prophet be made
jumping on a bed? A great mind after all

is one filled with wonder, one which
soars upon the realization of humanity,
who feels the force of a spring in a single
propelling vibration that defies ceilings,
even upon the collision of head and plaster.
Today, jumping on the bed is wisdom, so

I will soar with a child-like laugh,
following the scientific experiments of
a young messiah. My spirit has no enemies
only time and homework to neglect. 

E-Day 126: For the First Flush of Day

They broke through near dawn,
the shadows trailing the sun
like shy children, across the harshly lit world,
a blessing from some
sympathetic God to those
prepared to die at the prospect
of facing another day.

One settled on my shoulder,
whispered stories from its brothers and sisters,
asking me to write their testimonies
and burn them so
they could finally feel warmth.

I let you read them first,
those shady narratives of the desperate, arranged
in a wretched bible whose commandments
I could never honor and that betrayal
was my first of many mistakes.
One day I saw a shadow settle
on your shoulder and it fed me your story
to be burned with the rest of them.

But still, every day, for some reason
the sun rose for me
even on the days I could not bear it. 

E-Day 125: For an Ideal Being

The first sentence we learn we learn as wholes
our bodies and language meeting in sync,
our hands and feet loud linguistic controls,
our ribs and breath the source of all we think. 

This synthesis is annunciation
a meeting of the earth and heavenly mind,
enthroned in perfect pronunciation.
There is no language of a greater kind.

Our true baptism comes when we first speak,
is affirmed in verbal celebration
a light that guides us towards that which we seek
our truest, most divine declaration.

Because words reside in your brittle bone,
which shall be your spirit’s greatest throne.  

E-Day 124: For the Last Shadow

And the black target-the spot of a man’s lung plate-
the image that arose from a thousand cigarettes
blazed in the mind of the avenging angel
but he refrained from action because we all have stories

and though his inner organs were pure few angels claim
that part of a soul. So he put up his flaming sword
and bought cigarettes from the local liquor store
before ambling up to heaven again, smoke on his breath.

It was the sort of occurrence people write songs about.
The sort of day when angels develop vices.
We all have the same targets in our anatomy, just
their more vivid on some of us more than others.

That day the snow fell like ash
because those other winged-saviors, hands shaking
kept asking their friend for a puff, letting the taste
of nicotine embrace their insides like salvation.

Even God took a quick break to head out back
and have a smoke, exhaling with His eyes closed
as He enjoyed his first break in a long time.
I don’t think anyone’s seen him since. 

E-Day 123: For When the Wind Rises

My threshold, half steel, half metal wing
is a bi-plane engineered for breaking through
ancient atmospheres. You can’t step across it
without losing your fear of heights.

Do you find this introduction exhilarating,
talking to God in some rickety but beautifully
engineered bird that may or may not plummet
gospel-first into a Bermuda Triangle?

Or did you maybe think praying was easy?
If you want to ask something you must first acknowledge
the perpetual absence of a parachute. It’s not 
about lacking fear, but controlling breathing.

And before you make an affirmation, yes
I am crazy and sometimes dream of becoming
a feminist prophet Amelia Earhart but it’s no fun
calling out to God from a grounded church.

So, if you like, take my hand. There is music
in the rotation of this cracked propeller, salvation
in the scream of wind on metal and something
like flight on the other side of this elevated threshold.  

E-Day 122: For the Thoracic Ganglion

Rising from the diaphragm and resonating in the upper-chest
comes the first whisper of your voice, like spring rain.
How long have you waited for this moment?
Can you count the eternities on one hand? No, never
because you thought your insides were hideous and fragile, unfit
for the light of sound, tools born in blood.

But then she had to come
and reach inside your gut, extracting anxieties
like a God drawing out ancient poison from the faithful, proclaiming
each individual part of your unstable mass a miracle.
You lay yourself out before one, incredible feeling.

It was as if every storm
that ever resided and rolled through ever great story
came to cleanse your sporadic heart.

You arose reveling in the mismatched pieces of yourself
and like a child prophet, beloved by ancient language
you opened your imperfect secrets
and they flew out in wondrous, illuminated music. 

E-Day 121: For the Smile in the Dark

I wait for days and weeks to enter,
unobtrusively, between now and when
I will step out into the sun and
search for your face, submerged
in a beginning. Units of time squirm
anxiously in my pockets as they become
lead weights, threatening quite maliciously
to drown me if I’m not careful.

But human collectivity triumphs
as I remember your struggling against the same
boundaries and that will be our lives
I think, breaking a few ceilings on our way
up and through time. Today we have limits
and one day we’ll regret pushing them until
they become spiritual or scientific in which case
we will just smile before going on with our lives,
as if we’d known each other forever.

Even Time who delights in making us
so cagey will whisper “You two are going to make
a grand old show of it, aren’t you?”