I Can Feel My Physical Energies Tweaking The Words

I can feel my physical energies tweaking the words
like birds and dragons waking up, my voice
a hive of dopey bees, my eyes, a hangover of stars.
My heart is syncopating its keyboard
to a flash of rhythm riffing like sunlight
on the waves of the lake exorcising its ghosts
as the waterbirds emerge out of the fog
like low flying lovers looking for their reflections
as a place to land. Have you ever noticed
when birds are swimming in a mirror
they always make a bow out of a fletched arrow
with an S curve in their necks as if
there were an unseen archer over the next hill,
target, arrow, bow and flightpath in a musical unison
of migrating violins from further up north
who stayed to winter here where it’s mild by comparison?

This is the magic, and the mystery, the exuberance
and the joy, the black ecstasy of the blood
deepening its own enlightenment shedding its cowls
for a carillon of bells that sound like hollyhocks
with something to celebrate, though it isn’t necessary
to know what it is. The fountains come and go
like dolphins coming up from the depths,
breaching the surface of life to breathe again.

The eclipses have come off like the hoods of falcons
I trained like words to sit on my wrist to show the doves
how to write a more intriguing loveletter
with a little blood on it like the seal of what you meant.
I set them free for good to write what they want.

My mind is trying to create a cosmos out of
an inchoate windfall of bliss that’s slowly
beginning to cover the planet in an atmosphere
that supports life symbiotically as if every note
of its resonating leitmotif had to be heard
like a hummingbird in a thematic context of larkspur.

I don’t need to understand myself. What fool
goes looking for the sun with a starmap?
I elaborate the light like an astrolabial star catcher
that doesn’t care where this is. I’m not
echo-sounding this radiant mantra of a shipwreck
for lost treasure I can haul up from the bottom
of a wishing well. I’m living the aftermath of a dream
that whispered the Pleiades into my ear last night
as if the night were pouring its heart out into a shell
the way every river is gathered up by the sea
like a suggestive line of poetry flowing
like serpent fire up the lunar thread of my spine.

My spirit’s mining diamonds in the eyes of shepherd moons.
I love to watch them thaw like tears in the heat of the heart
once it’s fired up like the urns of the ashes of the stars
in the furnace of a black hole glowing again like a halo
collaboratively shaped out of billions of transformations
going on under my eyelids like distant hills on the horizon.
My unattainable singularity is counterpointing the light
in a way that enhances it like neuronic roots of black matter.

This is the joy of a death in life experience
that doesn’t leave death on the outside looking in.
This is the rapture of life in the midst of death
waking up on both sides of the same threshold
like a bride being carried forth after she’s been carried away.
With every breath, I lift a veil, and millions of eyes are revealed
like the dew and the stars and the fireflies
that cling to me like a single blade of grass.

I am summoned like the fragrance of a black rose
to the strange beauty at a seance of the evanescence
like a childhood song it made up lightyears ago
full of the joy that ripens the sad apples of our sorrows
into a compassion for everything that must perish
to go on living in a universe that doesn’t forget a thing.

Where memories don’t grow old, and the prophecies
of our ancestral skulls are anticipating us
in the available dimensions of the future
wondering if we’ve changed much since
they first conceived of us arriving out of the blue
like the transmigration of souls in the bodies of Canada geese
rising awkwardly from the leftover harvest of cattle corn
brittle in the frosty moonlight of those
who are about to be born again like the Milky Way
shining like a patina of stars on its own ashes.

I carry on like the light on a long journey
exploring the history of the future like a nightwatchman
opening the gate of the lantern he’s just blown out
to trade his candle in for the dawn, releasing these words
I set free from the opening aviary of my voice like birds
life multiplies like my joy in being alive well beyond necessity.