Sneakers

 

I dreamed I was young again

which seemed natural

(and woke up old again

which did not.) 

I had on kicks that looked as if

they'd been left out in the rain,

buried in a mud slide

and chewed up by wild dogs.

Does a life get old, too?

When is the last day of school?

When do all these teachers

lose their love of lessons?

I dreamed I was looking

for new blindingly white shoes

to make my feet like new brides

puppies fresh as fabled loves.

I woke up gimpy, slow, sore.

A shining soul misplaced

in this beat-up box of a body.

It must be keen for a new ride.

I dreamed I was young again

but woke up old

without possibility of parole

except by the sleep that cures and mends.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Game Six. 

Music: Grace Potter, I Shall Be Released

Process notes: I did dream last night that I was young again and wearing completely worn-out sneakers from long travels. I had it in mind to buy new, spiffy, blindingly white ones that day as I had another journey ahead.

   Some years back, I had a dream in which I was vividly, pointedly, and emphatically told that April 17th would be my day to step across into the light. However, there was nothing about what year. And so, every spring I get a little nervous. In fat, I was seriously scared the first time around, but the day has come and gone several times now and like Elton John, I'm still standing. For the first time, I'm sanguine about the day approaching. If this is the year, I'm okay with that.

To Those Dead On Public Transport

 

To those dead on public transport,

we do not judge.

Perhaps you do not know, and not knowing

is just a vacant compartment that the Clerk

Of All Knowledge fills with folded messages.

The various vacuum attachments,

marrow spoons,

foreign capitols,

all may confound and confuse.

Majestic death takes its place with these.

To those dead on public transport,

you needn't concern yourselves further

with stops,

schedules,

responsibilities,

or other petty matters.

Your destination has come to you instead.

Have no worries about your husk of flesh.

If muscles relax and give way,

water is the same whether in glass or lake;

soil the same whether in pot or prairie.

If others snicker, 

they have forgotten their own beginnings.

To those dead on public transport,

this bulb, this skin, 

this womb in which you gestated

now opens.

You emerge. 

It is not the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

You need do nothing but exist vividly,

God's bauble,

taken up,

cut and polished,

worn with pride,

shining brightly.

_________

for Sunday Muse #188

Armageddon Lullaby

Birds flew high above a world on fire.
Around my neck a river worn as below my body burned.
In my hair a water-garland where water birds turned.
All around, the black-robed dead, on legion ashen pyres.

I called to the birds above a world on fire.
Called and sang to the birds from my disintegrating throat.
The birds spun from glass and the heavens entire
were turned by my song first to whispers, then to smoke.

Around my neck I wore a childhood stream.
In my hair a feather garland made of swans and steam.
The world turned red, then orange, then white
and the birds to choristers of anthracite.
________

for Sunday Muse #89. And for the world in flood and fire.

Crow Heart

I told you from the start,
from the morning you came through my open door
tripping on a hinge flopped dead on the flagstones,
that crows had nested in my heart.

My fairy tale cottage had survived the bombardment;
just a little gingerbread dust on the plates and tables.
You arrested me with such restraint
and took me before the local commander almost tenderly.

Judge and executioner grow out of each other's backs here,
squabbling, one keen to rot on the bench, the other furiously knitting hoods
out of rationed sail cloth and sheer frustration.
I smiled at them, took your hand, got you reprimanded.

My crows live for trickery because they are crows.
I am an honest woman, but they have nested in my heart,
so all night long I hear them gearing up their little printing press
and in the morning I am a prohibited edition and you have to act.

My crows dash themselves against the cathedral bells 
even as my show trial continues. Ring! Ring!
They have no respect for anything, and I have caught their fever.
I sway as if on ropes and pulleys, and my advocate warns me to stop singing.

We might have loved, you and I, in my gingerbread bed,
if we had met when people still cared about things.
As it is, I sink the shiv in even as I kiss you, but the birds whisper
inside my chest, insisting that I leave you a trinket, my old heart, 

bright and worthless as a penny.
_______

For Transforming Fridays, "totem animal".

top image: Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil