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.

Pieces of a Sea: What Narcissus Saw When He Looked to See

We fall.

Again and again
we fall...
from the highest places,
from the mountaintops (those palisades!)
from the ledges out of windows,
from the nest
from the hearts of those who loved us best...
from me,
from you
we're falling
in love
and out
again...

The cages
and the caged:
a goat on a chain wrapped around
a stake in the ground,
chewing cud with vacant eye,
long-named chemicals drifting through these veins like
slow-swimming salmon,
my heartbeat a thunder of applause
as I'm plummeting
as I fall beneath the skin of me
into that empty sea of secret places...

Into the sea of the too-oft unknowns that lie
between the two of us,
pieces of me
spent freely on failed love and fallen friends,
mothers in hospital beds who confess that children
were never the dreams they had dreamt
for their tiny, pale frames...
secrets
again and again,
the line between us all...

Pieces
of a sea,
pieces assembled to make the dreams I dream,
walls and walls all built like cages
in a zoo
in a prison
a church
in an altar
a cell, a heart,
a crystal ball;
pieces cast like tattooed bones to form the lazy shape of me,
the dissonant,
the quiescent all begging to be spoken of
in soft, sweet breath...

The cages and
the caged....
the sirens and the call
all much the same;
how I can take you inside of me and still not know a part
of the story behind your eyes,
that soliloquy;
sons who barely know their brown-eyed mothers,
those beautiful women all humbled by age,
brought low
to see that the world is not as infinite as they had hoped,
marrow sitting in bones
passed on to children like dice

thrown
thrown
thrown
out into an endless sea
in a gambit of hope,
again and again with the dreaming
the falling into the depths of the sea:
the oceanic,
the depths of me falling away
into a yawning night
where all the unknowns sleep,
where all the secrets lie...

secrets
again and again,
secrets always just the same:
the unspoken,
the quiet embers I hold inside
that flicker
that glow,
that light all the world aflame as I'm walking,
as I'm diving
down
down into murky depths of me.


~ S. A. Warmack

Umbra

City

gone quiet all around me,

dim, shut-eyed windows all sleeping

with couples in their beds with

arms with legs

tangled hair all in a knot,

two people wrapped around cores of shining stars,

an entire universe of lovers on this quiet street...

Flicker

and glowing like lights through my

fingertips (touching fingertips),

the corona, chromosphere

expanding outwards from them in a halo of love,

like beacons

signal fires calling out to all those

like me

who are lost on city streets,

wondering why the best parts of themselves

are not enough to be loved

Their fires call

and I am not immune to the sound,

to all that glowing light

that casts me in the umbra of its impossible glow,

me,

this ghost,

wandering these city streets at night.

Clarion

I saw my shadow
backlit
against the morning sky,
a giant stretching its hands for miles
and miles,
thousands and more,
as though to say, "behold, I am born."

Cloud decks beneath me
and engine noise,
I am made of distances
that must be crossed,
I am made of silences that must be voiced:
a trumped call,
a clarion voice.

Against those palisades
I am only a man,
only me,
and yet...

the sun behind me lends wing,
and I raise my arms out wide.

Infinite Vessels: Mysterious Skin

Songbird
drifting in the night,
out there where all the monsters sleep
down in the deeps,
down in the dark water where we can not see...
beneath that skin.

Don't go into the water,
don't go into the sea,
sinking like all those wooden ships
made of ribs and steel, skin
filled with the dreams of men much like me,
full of wanting and things like hope who set them afloat
like children on the shore...
I can not swim.

I send you things like songs,
like poetry and words
over phone lines to ease the pain
of all that missing, the empty places inside
no one ever quite sees
we have been taught to be so afraid of,
chasms of yawning doubt and fear that fill the places
where hope should be, your hand in mine...
I would sing to you.

We are infinite vessels my dear,
sweet friend:
worlds inside of us spun out wildly
so worth the seeing,
if only you knew of all the things we could be
numbered like all the stars and planets and comets in the sky,
constellations of beauty right here
beneath such mysterious skin
of heart and flesh and bone,
of the things inside of us worth all that living,
of the things I write about,
of the songs I make and the songs I sing
of the ways we glow,
of the ways we glow...
fiercely.



____________________________


There is something to the idea that, in saving someone else, you save yourself... parts of this were taken from a conversation had with a friend dealing with depression; they were thinking of putting an end to it. Finite answers to temporary problems... I didn't realize, though, at the time how deeply unhappy I was myself; how far I'd sunk into the same paradigm of of empty places I was feeling all too often. We were like a mobius strip of consolation: one talking the other out of a decision that they themselves were thinking of... it's a funny, odd thing. I don't pretend to understand it all, but some of these words were what was directly said to this other person... all of these words are what I have come to say to myself. All of these words are what I'm putting out there now in a supreme act of vulnerability...

In my act of defiance.


Much.