Ever untouched by prying eyes
Your incandescence knows no price
No quantity of gold could wager
Your glimmering translucency

For beauty sits through frosted glass
It knows no mirror image
In sunny spells it lights the way
Just possible to distinguish

At night it sits upon the lake
Which ruminates inside your head
To change you but remain unchanged
To glow when couples wed

You are the anthropomorphism
Of waves on a summers day
You are the moment two opposing
Paths conjoin in harmony

In the instance your cover’s blown
Your reflection sits untampered
For that instant your delicate soul
Lies naked, conserved, unhampered

For all of this I sit in awe
As viscous silver streams
Carve channels at your feet
Ejecting precious molten metals

Which ignite with scorching heat
I find the strength to sit up
Then rise up onto my knees
Put out your hand and pull me up

I feel so deeply of your beauty
I cannot help but smile
When I think of your gift to me
It strikes me that time has passed

Since the sun shone to illuminate
Just how grateful I am to have an
Opposing path through frosted glass
A flower to my unkempt leaves.

(I think it is telling me to sit still like this and reflect for a moment)

the rain brushed her hips along the fingertips of the mountains
someone is grinding a tear drop of mine between two stones

the moon is no help to me now

light sings a squeaky lullaby and i am lost to the rhythm

kicking my feet inside the womb of this sun
though I do not remember dancing or listening

she was a whisper that cried into a mountain
and I was her fantasy, slipping thoughtlessly into a dream

she was a wraith singing songs of longing
and the loveliest one of all was the one she sang to me

i followed the sound up the mountain
she was a faceless vision and my steps never faltered

the curve of time disappeared into the horizon
she was behind me, like a puzzle pressed against the sky
a sky giving birth to the back of my mind

she touched my hand and nodded upward
eyes alight with the shimmer of a summer moon

it's all impulse, there's very little conscious thought to it

I was a mythical creature once.

I lived in a small picturesque town
next to a little hole of blue water.

I sang the sweetest songs.

Mortal man never heard the like before.
They wandered by to listen very often.

They say my feathers fairly sparkled
and if the sun lived closer he might outshine me.

There was darkness that the feathers covered.
No one could tell what destruction lurked beneath.

But I lived to sing that song.
Morning, noon and night. I put my heart in it.
I never faltered, but once

and I looked in the placid lake to see my own reflection.
The monster that looked back at me grinned
at my surprise.
The darkness laughed out loud.

And I did nothing but climb that tall live oak.
As close as I could get to the sun
and I built my nest with twigs.

I lined it with bits of color, silken scraps
to echo my plumage.
And I lined it with sweet-smelling spices
cinnamon and lavender and myrrh.

And then I sang my best last song
'til the suns rays came too, too close.

I kept singing til my last breath was ash
until the day that I will begin again.

The things we say to one another:
we could
choose
to make them mean something.

I could tell you that I love you,
even though we've never
really met. You could
tell me that you're dying
and it scares you.
We could talk about the rise and fall
of injection-moulded empires,
the rise and fall of your
mother's chest, as she
took her last breath.
We could vow to behead tyrants together.
We could promise
that we'd never fall victim
to that same sickness. We could
compare our hurts and find a
connection
in our mutual pain. We
could try to share our loneliness,
and maybe the world
would be less lonely.

Or at least we could
speak,
like you're a person
and I'm a person, like we're both
made of the same
beautiful, doomed matter,
only separated
by social convention and
accidental skin;
we could say something worth saying.

Instead: plastic bag tax, The Match,
weight loss and where to buy
the best factory-seconds shoes,
the televised finals of something or other,
the rising cost of corned beef, the
obligatory conversation piece
about the weather.

Can't we talk
just a little bit
bigger than this?