The Convalescent: The Emperors New Robe...

Set
the world on fire with this song,
set the world down like it never meant
a thing at all,
that pyre climbing into the sky
towering
(my own little Babel),
so I might know the face of God
reflected in the eyes of a hundred million people,
little jewels aglow all around me;

the face of a man like any other,
but a man just the same,
full by equal measure of the self-same desire
for loving, to be known and held,
that govern the inside of me...

A flawed creature in design
reflected in eyes like projection screens
all showing the same film,
playing the same musical score,
fire raging all around us as the things we adore
all blow away,
spiraling up toward the sky
as glowing ash,
tribute to a God as crippled by doubt as I,
defined only by the things we have loved
as they drift away
into the howling night.

The Convalescent: Ghosts, Calm Down

Trapped
behind walls
behind veils,
cages that rattle with bars like hostile enemy lines
drawn in the sand,
places we always come to for the fighting,
I am left to pacing
back and forth
like so many wolves in the zoo
made to look pretty before the crowd...

Waiting
for the better parts of me to come home,
for the night-singing birds
who call in the dark
with the rising of the moon,
I can only wander these hallways
and wonder about the absurdity of empty beds,
about songs I sing into the night....

The implausibilities of love too much to know,
I can only laugh at a world gone mad,
the eerie sound filling up this house.

The Convalescent: Howl

hungry moon
heavy in the sky,
the heat of the day evaporates from the sidewalk
in radiating waves
beneath my feet...

restless ghosts
moving,
their vague shapes changing
until they resemble the better parts of me,
indefinite
soft around the edges,
I am come undone by the things they need of me,
subjugate and prone by the light of the moon...

I can only howl.