How can I take in Mariana to Everest
And battle Time, when she thinks she’s the cleverest?
Here’s a curled-up baby, damp and crying
Blinking with its black eyes at the room
Every eyelash, fingernail complying
With the human blueprint from the womb.
Here’s a wrinkled shell, her soul still beating
Even after AIDS has gnawed her flesh
How to live when all of life is fleeting?
How to age, when birth appears so fresh?
How to love, when lovers die tomorrow?
How to rage, when justice walks away?
How to grieve when tears don’t lessen sorrow?
How to see the weave within the fray?
We must follow creature intuition
What humans did before we managed fire
We must understand another being’s condition
And do our best to give what they require.
We serve our human sisters and our brothers
We cannot always choose their paths through mortal night
Touched by the ancient calling: healing others
It’s enough to lend our steady beams of light.
I spread myself out and melt into the grass
Becoming the blades of translucent sun-glass
I am the bubbling under the stream
The salmon that fall through acrylic and steam
I melt underneath and become beetle shells
The nettles the splinters the crunch and the wells
The hollow and echo and ghost through the trees
Breathing the waters and rustling the leaves
I am the sky now, the moon-clouded sun
The breath in your lungs and the drum of your run
I am the skin holding blood to your chest
I am the dewdrops on pinecones undressed
I am the rock rolling up silver hills
To generate forest from butterfly frills.
I am the scraping of birdsong at eve
The kisses of lava on saltwater frieze
I am the washing of particled stones
The salt-weed and sea moss and ocean-bleached bones
I am the jungle infusing exploding
I am the tundra diffusing unloading
I am the depths of sulfurous sea valleys
Crabs spidering through my Riftia alleys
I am the heights of the quartz-weighted peak
Lighter than air where peregrines seek
In one slip of time, with a reach of my toes
A stretch of my hips and scuff of my nose
I reach out to space with the tips of my hair –
Come talk with me, child; you’re under my care.
Are we a pestilence or are we angels
Did we come here to destroy, or save?
We, the creatures who defined the angles
Between the stars, and sailed the ocean wave
Are we much mightier than the fruit flies?
Than all the creatures free in forest shade?
Are we constructing such elaborate murals
That we can’t see our own reflections fade?
We came from dust, to dust we shall return
Let’s not drag all other life inside our urn.
I am a broken thing now
All of my feathers are frayed
I hold a glass in my claws
And shiver under its weight.
The poison that heavied my soul
Was a slow, thick drink.
I was baptized in human tears
Over a hospital sink.
Or maybe I was drowned
with human blood and hair
I can’t distinguish exactly
(but it smelled like hospital air.)
I cannot watch sad films
See the actors’ broken eyes
Because my broken back
Hauls the weight of their actual cries.
The fiction is no longer fiction
It’s wrenched itself off the page
But real fiction’s worse than fiction
Since nobody filters the rage.
Nobody gives your hero
The extra chance they deserve.
They beat your hero with a bat
And crush them like a nerve.
They burn your hero with matches
And go out to watch the game
You document the wounds and regrets
And remember your hero’s name.
I sailed a rowboat to the edge of the world, where the atmosphere meets open space
Launched straight up, as the smoke unfurled, as the waves grew small and the clouds uncurled
I found myself in that place.
Then at the cusp where the sunlight streamed and the edge of the world goldenly gleamed
and my breath was frozen in the still night air,
I lifted my arms, tossed back my hair
And my boat tipped forward past invisible edges, like a thousand needles on a thousand ledges
and I trimmed the air like I sculpted hedges
For a single moment I was one of the stars, and the sunlight pierced my eyes and my scars,
and I caught my breath in the breathless void, and the sun slipped behind the edge, destroyed.
Then I shot towards the ground with incredible speed, as though I were riding a flaming steed, with the wind in my hair and my hair on fire and each muscle stretched and tuned as a wire,
and I charged the earth as the earth stood still, racing the ice down an endless hill,
and the coastline grew sharp and I thought I heard waves,
and the dead raised their eyes from their ancient graves,
as I roared and I sliced and I bled and I raved,
And i burst to the ground with my head unshaved
As I lay on the grass looking up at space
And the breeze brushed the years and the tears from my face
I sank back deeply and felt each blade
Like a mammoth's fur, like the earth had frayed
And I heard an owl weeping in the night
And gravity held me and pressed me tight
I remembered and sung what I'd heard before
As I seeped down to sleep inside the core.
Who wields the hand behind the whitened blade
that carves the edges out around the clouds
to let out light, the fire encircling shade
a fracture spewing sunbeams over jade?
And all those carvings, where on land are they?
Perhaps the carver catches them before they fall
or maybe they dissolve in stormy ray
and crash as crystal rains, a broken spray.
Jade forests turn to gold beneath the sun
and honey milk flows over endless crowds
illuminating sweat of those who run
and melting through the ice of day. It’s done.
Why should the preface of the night be flames?
The sun’s farewell, before she dons her shrouds
and tucks behind the mountain range’s frames
the final shriek from she who no one tames.
Is it because each time she’s dying new?
To rise again through song of dawning birds?
Perhaps this wild display is her tattoo
upon the world before she’s gone from view.
Perhaps she never knows if she’ll return
Perhaps she wields the knife herself, an art
She makes the color blood, in patterned fern
She burns the heavens with her spirit’s churn
The question that these paintings all beget
is not the sunset then, but shy regret
that as a mortal, I may be offset
by night that’s bound to end my own vignette.
When that day comes, I’ll wait, a parapet
and hear the air films moving through the trees
I’ll see upon the ground my silhouette
inked by my friend, her knife wrapped in a net.
The sky is calm; she writes my epithet
a blue with hues of starry alphabet
Tonight I meet her, and together we’ll forget
the reason why we feared to be reset.
A millipede waves on the sidewalk dust
ruby-backed scales with a touch of rust
deliberate marching straight towards the street
a road not perceived by the undulant feet.
I pluck it up and it curls to protest
blocking me out as it hides, distressed
I place it away on safe grass to rest
knowing for sure it will ne’er be impressed
that I saved it from death
that I did what was best.
I try not to view the crawler as flawed;
I am probably just like that creature to God.
Lizard lays on log lapping up the light
Never nodding off unless it’s nearing night
Licking at the air, licking at the stone
Clicking blackened claws
Happily alone.
The dandelion lived in a curious meadow
Where tulips and roses grew wild
The dandelion talked at the yellow sun
And smiled at the passing child
The roses and tulips said
“You don’t fit in. You’re simple and tiny and sad,”
But the dandelion yellowed itself for the birds
With all of the yellow it had
And mirrored the sun with all of its might
And thought that one day it would burst into light
Trying so hard; living simply and glad.
The roses and tulips grew old and decayed
The dandelion woke and its beauty had frayed
But the dandelion captured the whitened sun
In its prisms of fluff all arrayed
And it danced in the breeze and sung with a wheeze,
“I’m living; I won’t be dismayed.
I’d like to improve the world a bit
Make it a brighter place
But if I’m to fade, that’s how I was made,
So I’ll smile and bow out with grace.”
Then the dandelion drifted off to sleep
And the wind scattered prisms far and deep
And the birds and the grasses drooped down to weep.
But then by surprise, before all of their eyes
Fed by the sunshine dried from the skies
Dandelions covered the meadow in streams
And sang to the sun, and flourished and dreamed
From the dandelion’s still life, out sprung the young
To sing out the joyous still left to be sung
And the old dandelion looked down from the sun
And smiled as the sky shone brighter by one.
Fluttering in the wind lives the ribbon
Fluttering in the woods out of the corner of my eye
Sometimes through the trees I glimpse the ribbon
Distilling all the sunbeams, praying to the sky.
If it’s on a young tree, perhaps it’s from construction
But I suspect an old tree marks the ribbon’s timeless lie
Placed in rituals long ago to remove the dark obstruction
That sequesters the divine beyond the reach of human eye.
Sometimes when I’m looking down with glasses set beside me
I see the ribbon acrobatting in the trees nearby
The only way it has such freedom is its knotting to the treeside
If I set the ribbon free, it would descend to earth and die.
The only way it’s animated – writhing, reaching, dancing,
Is the wind invisibly surrounding it, to steer it
Sometimes I wonder if the ribbon’s measured prancing
Is describing the condition of my immortal spirit.
balladrael 
