Practice Falling

I’ve seen the monster

within me surface

during the night,

without words, yet tenacious;

search-lighting toppled canyons

and river beds, where nightly breeze

shapes the land

slurred with bile, swirling,

leaping to catch the musk,

keeping watch in the darkness

where all colors converge

in free fall.

I am an instrument of scorn

and pity, a tool for insecurity,

full of pixelated armor.

for sleepers who may be mere innocents.

I practice falling.

Fibrous roots, stripped naked

reveal perpetuated secrets butchered;

intone the music of crickets and mice,

wailing the tune into mid-air.

Dawn reveals the quaver of broken

rope, the blood-red

carnage at my feet.

I practice falling.

I try remembering what I have done

to fray the rope ends into nothingness —

a massacre, a cleansing — my hair dripping.

Laser beams change my world —

light-speed is flight. I soar before I wake.

I practice falling.

Letting Go

I climb the stool to sweep

cobwebs from the corners

and dust the photo-frames

featuring deceased relatives.

Darning your socks one more time

gives you another wear or two.

Those jeans I mended last month

are full of holes anew.

My family photo books are filled with recent

images, but none from the earlier generations

whose faces are lost in the mist of looting,

torched homes and prison camps.

I sit beneath the eaves today

and watched the icicles drip and sway

with the fierce wind that whips

this way—and vacillates the sunlight.

And yet, as daylight dims to dusk,

I’m am left clutching the husk —

only jealous of icicles’

ability for letting go.

Absolution

What bitter memories remain beneath the ash of years?

Masturbation and Mother Mary saved me

from the self-inflicted sacrifice of suicide.

Mornings freed for miserly ministries reveal

blue as shadows in the snow and life sinking to its frailest brightness.

The virgin certainty of arduously assembled and charmed faith —

this sheer burden of being human,

is a whisper from the slit between life and death.

How many hours in crisp adoration

will leave the veiled exasperations of life behind?

As if I were a life-long penitent wearing the hair shirt

under my gown, penitence and piety my nature

with no questioning of vocation;

it’s just a hamlet called farewell.

yet

Will the adoration chapel make me a saint?

—the altar lamp an eye of brightness in the gloom.

How many hours spent sipping soda and Scotch create a sinner?

What valiant effort does it take to make medicined stillness a soft repose?

Or to reject it—the pious intent of this body too meager to lighten

the deep hollows of darkness?

Yet, my night has its own lambent light, sparse and elegiac crooning

to a burnished gloss under a fierce, remembered glow

that ushers my pilgrimage through this somber life.

A solid, timber gatepost heaved out of the darkness is my faith.

It lays like a great mercy, a just deliverance, the renewal of hope

to this solitary soul saved by grace.