“Something there is, that does not love a wall.” Nature, most likely. A bit inside of us, indeed. Slipping under the tightly coiled rock, slithering through the scenery. The natural order of usurpers breaks free from the illusory chains at dusk to cut the wires and smash the hinges on gates for my apple orchard, and slowly rot away your peach stained masonry. “Good fences make good neighbors” comes muttering from under the sighs of exhaustion; disguises consume our focus and energy, and steal the road away from the proper course. It may be so, that sealing the traffic keeps corruption at a minimum, but bad walls make better people.
Who was it that said “Let be be finale of seem?” An imaginer, if I’m not mistaken? And yet, from the ivory tower, or rundown Southern hotel, a man looks down upon the minds of servants who, in their dreams, craft beautiful torment in the form of chains. I cannot have it in me, the blacksmith’s whisper, to pound out the cage that calls the sweet songbird. My imagination lends itself to words that float and tease, in a corporeal form, visceral in nature, but weigh me down like metal all the same. There is a sad beauty but little truth to the captured bird who sings contemptuous songs of freedom. Let the tapestries of our hopes be displayed in full, slipping through the cracks of our prisons, so that we, who will love hope for hope’s sake, sew together the black and the white.
The long sleep comes, with no promise of dreams to bear. Forcing down my soul into this or that box, equipped only with my pen to label. With the midnight hour approaching, a raven flies me my memories, of a life long lost, removing all hope for another. For who would be so blessed? So I look in the lines, and weaves and reweave the webs, to try and spell a world in a word: I. To no avail; I admit defeat. The thread sags and slips to the ground, and the lines fracture into smaller tracks, and smaller roads. There’s always something closer, something more intimate far away from me. The black feathers bring me wishes for a woven blanket to hold me close at night, but wishes cannot keep you warm. I reach out to hold the hand that fell from my body, but it was only an idea that I was holding, frozen in time. Gone are the bodies that housed the pinpoints on my map, the vertices of my web that softly shattered into a heap. Gone are the shadowy wings that heralded my messiah of the past. And gone is the light-hearted laughter than rings in the ears of morning minded souls. The clock strikes me from my archaeology, and reminds me of my duty. And so, I bare my body to the cold winds with no comfort of blanket nor lover’s breath to warm me, and wide-eyed, I slip into the sleep where always and never meet.