We wear this city on our feet
Planting our roots with each step
Our shadows

cast shapes of ancient oak trees stretching out over old squares at daybreak
We grow here

with the spirit of buildings past,
present and rising like a staircase to heaven in the distance,
the plumes of white smoke from their rooftops as burnt offerings for incense,
spires for steeples,
the bundled masses of people moving beneath as the calloused soles
of our feet pounding the pavement,
Our congregation

seated in reverant silence on the R-Line hissing to a stop
Their hushed prayers filing out from within to bring the reclaimed sidewalks of Fayetville Street back to life to join this pilgramage
They march

downtown toward Capitol
holding signs for disarmament
They bar-hop through Glenwood toasting to deliverance
They move in a blur of faces that become us,
Rush at all hours through our veins
Cross our hearts and keep us breathing,
Moving
wearing the city on our minds
like the greyest pieces of their winter sky and the way it caps the peaks of Mount PNC, BB&T and Wells Fargo like hoodies over our heads
We assume monk-like appearances
in robes color-coded by season- from blue collar sweaters to cold hard sweat
We'll wear their city until we're worn out and wet,

We'll wear their dreams at night
like streetlamps flickering on beneath wired telephone poles carrying conversations about each one as far south as Florida, fears unspoken, made visible
on iron park benches too cold to sit on at this hour
We'll keep walking

and wear this city like backpacks over our shoulders

under the watch of their heavens,
the skyline
a glowing testament
of every step taken
toward someplace higher.

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgramage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

The soul it longs for completion
The heart has become a cobweb
On the bedroom ceiling

The time of migration is upon us
A time of pilgrimage
Travelled by millions in history of time

O son of Adam 
Go forth
And leave the world behind

Walk in the footsteps
Of the beloved leaders
A time to reflect and change one's life

Just for a while
We will take a break
And reconnect with our roots

Days governed by prayers
Spent in the Lord chosen way
You could never overdose on prayers

Your glare juts wide and traps me in an obtuse corner
Varying degrees of turpitude
Pivoting around the axis
Beaming rays of optimism
Linear into the continuum, until infinitesimal
An exertion with no assertion of retrieval
A harbinger screaming into a desolate chasm

"Nothing stirs."

You only have interest in superfluous self-degradation
Pessimistic introspection
Mocking your molecular geometry
Resisting the valancing
Fearing the internal reaction
Not noble, but wholly and completely nothing
Retaining no mass or substance
Your presence in the physical world is an irregularity, an enigma

I'm reaching for you
Breaching your flesh like an apparition, a translucent figment of the shell that once contained your potential

I am one of the few
I can observe you
Your spectral glow haunts and hypnotizes me like the spiraling eyes of the cobra

"If you could witness your fate in the the third person; would you?"

I can observe me

We converge,
Like vinegar and baking soda
Erupting with my bubbling destructionism; using your vessel as a medium

Ground zero
Inconveniently located at the epicenter of my quaking misfortune

Buried alive since exhumed from the womb
Every breath shorter than the last

A pilgramage of zombies
The festering runs deep
Curdling blood
Clotting and clogging
Coagulation in the vein
Withering remnants in are wake

Cyclical contaminyation
Praying for a cure
Begging for an antidote
Sleeping with the virus

The bravest of us all, was indeed
the queen of Carthage. Who all at once,
became a unity of her own.
A woman alone, drowned by the subtle gust
of pain from her fleeing love
gave her own breath, they say,
to pave a holy lineage.
The sword in her sternum the centre of a compass,
and there blew the stench of her
sacrifice to guide her love further adrift.
In her death, she did not require
the ******* of the son of Rome.
His fate swayed between the coasts
of the Tyrrhenian, but hers - a lovely and furious force,
a collision sharper than the
teeth of Scylla, a riot of the elements.
Dido did not sacrifice
her life for the pilgramage of Aeneas,
the ash that was once her skin
returned to the soil of her city, the vapour
of her spirit entwined within the winds.
And although her very being burnt
in glimpses of orange and red, I like to think
that her soul swam besides the vessel
of her downfall. Not to forever be beside
the man of her enticement,
but to surpass the will of fate
and find herself in the sway of the waves.
I like to think
that as she overtook the man and his crew,
into the open arms of beauty and possibility,
knowing the hope
the adventure
that awaited her,
she knew the power of a city
could not be contained within the shell of a man.