Haylasweet Times

What a rebel, calling peace antidote
and poem testament
of all days and nights that follow us
into obscurity, anonymity, the mask
undone, and behind it frail
mystic menace shot with fright.
What a bone to pick with you,
lonely dancer of the song
chanted in terse, voluptuous terror
that might’ve carried with its bell
clinging to the clang and cuckoo
a simpler tale of the tattling heart
than the memory steeped in tolls of
ancient dying feeding on starlight
love. How wilted the shock-borrowed
marrow and barrels of talk. It is
enough, almost, to feel the truth
in the sun as we hail the brighter
softer incense every day we breathe,
for not long ago we thought forever
the hard buzzing sheen of the ash
lingered to our mouths and down our
throat and lungs, a part of us now
shoveled at our feet, the cross-
hair fingered between what we used
to see, a pair of mirrors inside
which the nightingale sings, rises
in the flames they thought buried
the final melody of ohmygodiam,
and again coarse wind sacred speaks.