lux eterna

and then the whole world started wavering
like with eyes seeing from underwater,
shimmer
and halo distorting the edges of a life
held dear,
trinkets grasped at with the hungry hands
of a man too afraid to let go,
a man too soon consumed by the depths
afraid to admit to the drowning feeling
inside his lungs as they fill
as they burn
heavy with the suppressed need to draw a breath
to cry out
a name
a song
a curse
a poem in the name of god,
any god,
in the name of love and lust
and rutting like dogs in the grass
the bedroom
a seedy bathroom on a forgotten road,
all that living so much the same from one day to the next
as we're unaware of the breathing,
the expansions of muscles and sinew
all carrying on with the measured beat of life
that keeps the drowning men moving
shuffling
sighing to the rhythm of the painful,
the exhausting
the excruciating
the exquisite forms of love...

Drowning,
all the world overhead a mess of shivering light,
distortions and truths all much the same when side by side,
I would reach out with the palest hand
and touch the skin of the world,
a voyeur
a man aside:
too afraid to ever really know,
too in love to ever really see the beauty
the justice,
the wholeness
inside of me.

The Convalescent: Tell-Tale Hearts

Heart
in a box
buried in the floor
beneath oak and nail,
dust falling between the cracks
calling out my name,
somnolent syllables drifting down hallways
to fall into my ear,
that bottomless ocean
falling away into leagues and leagues
before it reaches the synapses...

Triggers
and catches,
snags a memory to the surface
like so many fighting fish caught in the dragnet,
empty-eyed;

Triggers
and catches all pulled
until I am remembering,
drowning in the open air
beneath the weight of what memory can do,
a heart discarded and so soon forgotten
beneath floorboards sent thundering,
fingertips tingling...

Funny the way it happens,
how easily a man can forget what it is
to feel the sunlight on his face,
heavy-lidded
laying in the grass while the clouds obscure the sun,
slices of light sliding through to move across the open field,
the occasional bird looking for love,
ants crawling all around...

The things we forget when all that warring is over and there are bodies on the ground, hearts locked away in safe places for safe keeping, for safe living, until we're far away from it all, the hurt and the harmed:

Survivors
all safe
but so very far away from the sunlight on our skin,
from the things that make you you,
and the things that make me me,
hearts all locked away
waiting for someone,
anyone,
to see.