At the Broken Point

At the Broken Point

Do you feel the weight of the stars on your back
     And the pressure inside your skull?
Do you feel the air grow thick like a stew
     And the world flood in through your skin
     As infinity shrinks to a speck
     And eternity ends with a thought?
I hear it: the imperceptible breaking of a toothpick
     On the other side of the house.
I hear it: the sharp snapping of a frozen twig in the snow
     On a mountaintop miles away.
I hear it: the brittle cracking of a thin piece of slate
     On the long cracked concrete driveway
     Of a house I used to live in
     Years and years and lives ago.
I hear it in all of the beats of my heart--
     Staccato footsteps on a heap of broken bricks;
I feel it in all of the sighs of my heart--
     Staccato footsteps on a temple’s fallen walls.

Image credit: Hamed Saber, from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons License.

Mirrorworld

Mirrorworld

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

With open eyes and bleeding heart
Take a hammer to the mirror
Of a cold and tired world,
And smash the dusty glass
Into billions and billions of shards,
The tiny gleams of light,
Like universes underfoot,
Then gather them one by one
With bloody fingers
And prickling palms,
And chew them,
Consume and subsume
The shattered light
Of a reflected cosmos,
The life and death
Becoming no more
Than ghostly forms glimpsed
From the corner of an eye,
Far beyond forgotten,
Long gone beyond the bounds
Of the mirror’s cracked frame,
And with burning bowels and fiery heart
Gaze upon the empty void
With eyes of flaming light:
For there are many new worlds
Just waiting to be made.


Image credit: Menetekel, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain image.