“Childhood’s Wake” (from Houses of A Crystal Muse, being released this week)

You can feel it

in the air,

a razory sheen,

all the childhoods

that were lost

or stolen

or seized

or buried to model catacombs

and secret lairs,

are returning to the surface

bigtime,

the reclaimants

growing new teeth

and skin

and nails,

new lungs

ballooning to breathe

in ferocious gulps

the holy body of air

charged on loan,

no longer just sipping

from a solitary puddle

through a pinched straw,

but open mouth pressed

like a passionate suction

against the blue-green lips

of the sea,

as if the lost

mad art

of deep-sea-kissing

could inflame

and ignite

a whole new breed of species,

as if every dream

formerly deferred,

or taken out back

and whacked brutally with a switch

until silence became stitches

sewn across lips,

no longer this,

but rather

Childhood’s quivering

and quaking vim

to know itself

as a source of real

and force of soul,

none of it scripted, but felt,

it’s coming back to melt

the dead weight of

fattened albatrosses,

to shake up the core

and very foundations

of what has been established

and set in faulty cement,

and this overdue zoobreak

of wild beauty and feral shoots

will require tending, nurturance,

and breaks from overstaid patterns

fitted to worn-out takes and conditions,

Childhood, as the frenzied sibling to mystic freight,

as the single blade of grass, bearing the greenest of blood-red

beginnings, will make its demands known, will birth necessity

through the gist of lore, and the calling of old wounds

to sutures formerly unknown,

and in this living wake,

Beauty and Grief,

as outsourced twins,

will surely follow,

and we, the claimants,

teetering on the edge of Childhood’s

flagrant beckon,

will re-set fractures

and find release

in going over the edge

to uncharted frontiers

and worlds beyond

our wildest imaginings.

(Cover image by Issa de Nicola)