On the edge of my windowsill, I sit
And count the little black and bustling heads
Clustered down below.
There is Life

In the pinnacles of the trees I tower over.
I feel It, breathing coolly down my neck.
I am soon to be reborn,
My countenance now aglow.

This is my precipice.
I will soar down from my mountaintop
Bearing word of reclamation.
I will sow my bones like seeds upon the wind.

My pupils scatter and drag.
I dream and eat the round, brown beads
In fitful sleep, my tongue pale and sallow.
This consciousness will not float.
The lids clatter shut like a kettle drum cooker,
A thing alive inside, more or less.
There is an echo,
Scuttle, and a cough. Strangers in the cellar.
There is no rightness to this, only sacrilege.
The unjust man chatters in my skull.
"Go home, go home!", I cry.
The sense of it all withers with the passing of the years.

I am dutiful, a docile child.
Mother tucks me in, again and again.
She need not keep me under lock and key,
So long as she knows that all is well.

I swallow my eternity,
Once in the morning,
Twice at night.
It is a bitter thing that drains
Ebullient, frightening laughter from the maw
And eats at all solemnity.
I am pleasant on the mind and secure,
A safe with nothing to hold.

Inside, the oven is out.
There is a storm turning,
Two cities over. Nothing to fear.
Someone has closed the shutters,
Venetian blinds blinking.
The tenants are sleeping, the house is cold.

It is not the taste you are after--

The caustic, lingering bitterness, no.

It is the change.

The small but definite step from haggard man

To bright and solemn sage.

You put the crystal to your lips

And drink eagerly, each breath that fogs the glass

An imperceptible whisper of your grievances.

What do you mean?
Well, what did you say?
What words or what whims
Did you mean to portray?
The furrowed black letters
Do not mind you at all.
They may seem aloof,
But they will heed your call.
So let go, and be free!
For if you do falter,
The words on your page
Are quite easy to alter.

Take hold the loose and bubbling tongue.
Unfetter the ridgid, crumbling flesh
Shoved
Into the snail's shell.
Shake off the jumping fly
On the edge
Of crust and dribbling sweet.
Let the languid breath
Float free.

Stiff, stiff as some barren tree
You stand,

A Greek goddess carved from cold marble,
Stark and white as an eye.

Where is the blood, the rose-colored flesh?
Some savage thing has eaten away

At all the softness. There is but tooth left,
Gleaming all over—pale, blank, and paltry.

Have all the world's mothers left you to dry?—
Mothers like the one that once slumbered in you?

It is shriveled with you now,
Your face, a sunken visage.

Wavering beanpole, you let your hair
Into the wind and stumble over nothing,

Nothing, all this nothingness!
Your body, your cheeks are bitten fruits,

The apple gone. This frame is but a filament,
A thing half-seen,

A crescent etched from this moon.