The window was open in the dream
In the house I built from all the perfect sentences
The things more worthy to worship
Than clothesline windstorms and
Curtain-rod jousts between
Closet clowns and the nights they hid from.
These stolen wings are an easy veil to wear.
Would you believe me if I told you I had seen a unicorn?
I left a prayer in the south of France
In a church I called upon to swallow a sinner
I went back for it
The day when forgiveness meant
Switching the soles of my boots and body
the room was filled with every person I ever wanted to meet
I pulled a snake out of my throat and let it slither down the aisle
This was never a confession
My father was a carpenter
He built pews for a chapel he could not enter
I can count the fingers on his right hand
With the fingers on my left
The aurora borealis in my leftover love said
“You were Marcel Ayme the day we decided
That he was better at beginnings than at endings”
Rachel took a rosary to her wrist
I caught her blood because my heart couldn’t pump fast enough
To satisfy the ones asking
We cannot be tied to this desert
I’m getting slow motion sickness on the speed train to someday
Somewhere along the way we stopped shoveling coal into these engines
Started using the bodies people left along the tracks
“it’s okay,” they say,
“We’re recycling.”
A Panamanian child born on neither side of the canal
Wants this holiday hate crime
To be something other than a compass rose riddle
I need a weather balloon catapult to launch my words into orbit
So they can work weightlessness to their advantage
There were never enough chairs.
Every person at the table sat alone.
This forced perspective spills arrows from my coronet
All the things meant to ornament justified distaste
Is the sky any more magnificent when you have a God to shove inside it?
Is the sea any more deep?
Is this body any more powerful if I believe it was made in the image of someone greater?
I can see so much more with my eyes open
My hands are open on every rooftop
I can catch every raindrop
This story is a work in progress
Someday this patchwork of scattered significance
Will become subject to the needle of retrospect
But for the moment I can but introspect
On a night that belongs to the words I cannot say
And to the person I cannot say them to.
I never again thought I would breathe golden.
Teach me to make blue of enslaved fortune.
Teach me how to cry in a world that will not feast upon my insecurity
I am learning to trust though I see only the shadow of the moon.
I am learning not to hate this inherited flesh
The unwoven threads that fail to shelter these shoulders
The guilt in my gait that I cannot seem to shake
The unwanted wit that tears at the seams of sobriety.
It’s amazing how many words you wrote in my genetic code that can carry just four letters.
I was never brave enough to break.
I have no merit for mercy