Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Fault Lines

    For Amy


Out of the womb of curiosity lies I,

a child

crawling on flatland,


walking into a world of my own,

painted in spray cans and skateboards,

illustrated in antidisestablishmentarianism,

rendered in the sound of my skull hitting concrete,

shown in TV Science, juvenile hall, and dial-up internet.


I’m slowing learning to walk,

heading heterodoxically towards your path,

towards our future together where we’ll be focused and infinite.


But some decades later, its mountains and muses,

tall rocks, 

disorganized patterns and relationships,

yet our minds create the greatest ranges of topography.


From the clearing of trees

your towering figure arises, 

reaching past the sky,

desiring that deep deep space, 

ever yearning with fingers of earth and rock

to be closer to the starlight.


A creature who creates valleys,

between peers and my person,

flowing higher from father sent magma,

a prominence commanding humility.

A blessed range.


Enticing the ravens and I with satanic apples,

inside lay knowledge golden – partnerships foreboding,

sweet sweet sustaining sugar,

an ephemeral energy I hope is everlasting,


As I ascend up your fault lines

we have hard conversations,

abuse, adorations, children, capitalism,

even this path of least resistance is hard,

we delayer clothes and old cardiac scar tissue,

exfoliating rock — nude smooth surfaces emerge.


it’s as elegant a path as I’ve ever known,

our repertoire of movements,

this interaction of intellect and action,

geological meeting rational meeting masses dancing.


Your platforms form a purgatory,

an oasis,

I hide from the sun in your tears,

naked in pools,

I close my eyes,

comforted by balmy saltwater,

I drift into another dream.


Someone in my mind attempts to remember you in my dreams,

a mind in mind materializes

this ghostly figure of you,

it’s turning into a fog,

it’s turning into this harpoon between my teeth.


I don’t remember falling,

it was a dream disconnected,

stone slid asunder

and I was gone.


I awoke and a world was gone,

you were gone,

to unroot and float across a whole ocean,

closer to autonomy and creation,

nourished by jungle fruit and science.


The air around your void still moves,

as if you still stood tall,

A negative image written in smoke,

your range and your hips still commanding the sky,

an aerial wake I can no longer escape.


I can't climb over your nooks anymore,

I'm not one of your angelic ravens,

Those black birds who still swoop into those old valleys, 

standing as reapers do over craggy vistas, 

small figures of death,

reminders of our relative staticity.


These unspeakable faults forged by my fallibility,

my failures,

my attempts left me only looking at summits,

and now only in memories,

a witness to your grace,

a witness to your immensity,

rendering my energy into scarcity.


I stumble into the fog that settles in that void,

searching for life,

for the possibility of flowers,

standing in the understanding that forgiveness is possible,

that rain will come and good people will come to deal with the damage.


Those tangled vines I had laid over your ridges,

intertwined delicately over your breasts

are rearranging into other things,

a transformation, an evolution,

breaking down into soil,

into fragments,


I sit on the surface pausing patiently for understanding.


This Earth is ever fertile,


the worms till and turn tirelessly.


In the emergence, I awaken,

this overly intrepid individual,

walking over flat topography,

forever seeking...