(Links 24 & 25 of a poetry exchange between Natalie and myself. Making a chain of cinquains [a Cinq-chain?] in an effort to "un-chain our muses.") (I think we have enough Chain-Links to make a Fence....) Around what dead thing are the vultures circling? There is always a corpse somewhere nearby. Nearby, there are blossoms breathing in the dark night. Why is the air so empty in our dreams? Our dreams where we descend with stones in our pockets like Virginia into the dark water — water which bears the weight and weeps to consume us and delivers our bodies back to land. To land in a place such as this, to fall like bombs into an abyss. Sky becomes water. Water waits for what falls. The bones of thoughts lie half- remembered, settling, eaten by time by time which wavers like curtains by a window devoured by moths, mice, and men until – until time stands with a backbone of its own and says with breath from a distant wind: enough. Enough of this wasteland pantomime, this taste that still waits on the edge of our tongue’s desert, desert of the mind’s end, end of the places where we can offer our selves any comfort. Comfort yourself knowing there are seas beyond these sand dunes, once you blink and open your eyes your “I”s left behind like so many broken shells once you realize mankind is one man one man walks alone, as kind as his dreams will let him be, real eyes seeing more and more and more than won men can handle, more than bartered men can bet on, until they close their eyes. Their eyes flicker like light— bulbs in dusty attics, following him into the dark places places no man should go until he has learned the way of the rat and the raven and Poe and Po, the old poet, knew that life in the world is just a big dream and not worth spoiling, spoiling with nought but wine since we ever know that nothing will never be the same again again I see my own eyes peering out at me from someone else’s face – I must free them free them before they rot the soft skull that holds them. Some thoughts should never be thought, or so we think We think we know what our eyes are doing when our ears are listening to the soft tick, tick tick, tick of the bones as they settle and soften in their assigned places in the mirror mirror yourself in the same place Sylvia saw terrible fish – grasp what you can before before it leaves your hands the way all sweet things must. Let it go before it gasps and goes limp goes limp, slips through your last frightened fingers into the gas, into the last space left to them to them that see the world for what it is. They see into the dark corners that we do not Do not go wandering or wondering where they make their homes – those are unholy waters waters where reflections are more real than the faces that cast them and move with free will free will not be easy and easy will never be simple and the hardest things are never never land is a far away place where nothing ever happens, no one dies and we’re bored we’re bored of the same old hero with his thousand faces and nothing new to say to us to us who take off our rings, put on our mother’s fur coat, pour ourselves a vodka and sleep the sleep of the damned and we’re all damned, aren’t we? We’re all going to sleep. Some choose not to. Knot 2: some don’t have a choice. Some don’t have a chance. None can choose to choose or not to. We lie. ...keepin' the Po in NaPoWriMo...
Cinquain Chain: Links 30, 31 & 32 (NaPoWriMo 2016)
7
A Prayer Like Gravity 