Mysterious Night

A warm breeze for a cold night, and the northern hills

be peace as the air strips the trees, until they are as nude

as the bones of ancient priests.

As, tremulous, the party barks inside the house,

its humble foundation shakes and argues with

the far off dread in the trudge of doomed giants.

I stretch my neck and force my face out into the

breeze. The night seems to ask the same question I've 

heard all day: Aren't you cold?

Cold? I do not know. Perhaps on the outside.

For the world is cold enough, often enough.

Though, if on this night there is violence, awful

fists of home, terrible knives of war, and the guns

in the streets that only brother can use against brother,

once they've both been convinced that they are shadows;

the starvation only the innocent can know, the screams

that wish to free the skull from flesh- none in

the celebratory cloud will know any guilt

in forgetting it. ‘So, bless them,’ I think to myself, ‘bless them’

and the clouds part to show a beam of

agreement from the moon. Even if we never speak

a similar language, there is no reason that this love

should ever rot. On such nights, I would embrace all of

those who would see me die, a lonely number in a forsaken

land.

What insects, that have survived the cold, leer,

and they become Minotaurs; and they snort their strange

language when I press my finger to my lips for silence; the

flowers are satyrs waiting to die: ‘The King is dead,’

they say, to which I answer, “I know,”- so they say no more.
And somewhere God says to a group

of felled trees: “My spirit shall not always dwell
with man, for he is also of flesh.”

So bless them? Bless them. So be it.

This most wondrous flesh shall find itself in darkness.

Sonia with legs in the tresses of her dress, finds

me through the portal opened and, with her, out flows

a torrent of crowded rabble, shocked by a scream of

gaiety. At once she smothers it until it is muffled entirely

by the door. Sonia with her teeth clenched from pills,

scolds me for the search, yet she had found me;
“You are alone,” she says, “Which is fine,” and she

lifts her face to bask in the moonlight, “You would

never let the moonlight meet your loneliness.”

The night clicks away its intricate clockwork, as
Sonia sits beside me and pulls her skirts to cover her

legs: “Aren't you cold?” she asks.

She shows me detailed drawings of the moon from
her notebook and frowns from the uppers

because everyone else is drunk. All that is lacking

are the screams of dying locusts.

In the darkness we will find ourselves and one

another. Our consciousness will merge and continue.

And if on this night, some fragmenting psychopath
lurks in the darkness and watches us with hunger-
There, on the porch, we would not believe it.

The moon glows agreeably, yet it seeks clouds
to hide its scarred face; so with hands capable of
paradise, and loneliness shown bravely, we bade it
stay.