Palindrome Tragedy

How long, was it
long enough?
when the fevered sunset muses
on two great tragedies:
a palindromic life,
and the death of a salesman -
each astonishingly thin and trite
when you're blind

a false wind rifles shells
through the lonely-limbed trees,
where night swallows land in song -
birds or dusk both neither

this night is every other
and all the stars rest
heavily on this night, distinctly
as uniquely as the next and first -
it's a flower, a violet with its violent
petals, vibrant with love,
and not a racecar,
or a dozen dimes, spinning
one just like the other,
they fall like leaves,
i wanted

a billion stars binary blinking
and i'm thinking behind stormy clouds
a decision - maybe every decision - is conceived



I'm feeling a lot better already. I'm able to count my symptoms on one hand, which is a vast improvement. In fact, I'm mainly left with a stubborn cough and a runny nose (light), and I've gotten a (read: one) REM cycle on each of my last two nights. I think my body needed to start sleeping again, and I'm thankful for all the prayers that were answered in those two nights of rest.
I had actually begun to fear the night, considering it a time of unrest and tired, emptiness. I couldn't do anything but sleep, and I couldn't sleep. Joseph Heller could have written a ridiculous satire about such a conundrum. Now, I'm still slightly wary about turning off my lights and crawling beneath the covers. I feel as though I'm expecting some trick, and the fever and additional symptoms will suddenly shout, "aha!" flip over my mattress and hop on top of me while I struggle to breathe smashed beneath the springs, feverish and beaten. No one should have to be afraid of going to sleep.

Belfry

Some nights are most poignant from the belfry

the tattered bat-wing clouds flap

over the blood-thirsty moon
hearts are swallowed,
pulled out by such a moon
I thought the sky protected me
gazing up so reverently
but this is darkness, and midnight
here is desperate, you notice
with sugar sweet starry lies
even the night cannot hide
hope in its many folds and faces

clearly, i see clearest, with my face lodged in the mud. If my heart sees and my soul beats, and my eyes simply be, though wallowing - perhaps finally this is where faith takes seed. Ask, and I will pray. Ask again, and I will answer your questions, give you directions, and wish you well on your way. Ask again, and I will join you, forever and a day, always.


uhohhhhhhh.... I think I'm addicted to italics....

Lyrique

Thunderstorms rage outside as I listen to melancholy musique, tearing up at the somber poetry and its symmetric outpour. Do not decry those tears; rain seeped through the window into my soul. I pen, in the silence that is the storm.
Where I stay up all night / And all that I write is a grey grey tune
Even the dim light of this laptop screen draws moths towards the window - night creatures eager for light. The bats soon swoop in for the feast. A great silk moth latches onto the window, and in my fright, I thought it a bat. Are they here for the light or the shelter beneath the eaves?
Are you looking for answers / to questions under the stars?
Dimly, the street lamps flicker through the valley beneath, illuminating needles of heavenly weeping falling onto unyielding asphalt. The souls of a thousand faces, spread across countless spaces, struggling, fighting, praying. I imagine a web of intersecting colors, illuminated by the cracks of lightning splitting this sky, a network of all our spiritual supplications. I read the Genesis, I read Psalms 23, I read Philippians 4, and I read Revelations 22. Listen, the storm is a song.
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away
Dreams collide, dreams of balloons and skies and transparent goodbyes, but distant, distant, as though a painting of a photograph of someone else's lives. It is a speculum of silver and stained glass, showing clearly nothing of love and hope and love, and the drums of the stormy night rage unending, though it is not rage, but the humming of bass strings.
All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Small rivulets burn their whispering paths down the hills into the valley, into the creek in the hammock of the hills. I suspect the salmon leaping upstream to love and death, inextricably bound, mind this not. I can hear their splashes, a counterpoint. A coyote howls, an owl shrieks, the creatures stand still. But not the rain. I smile, and wonder what whispers the wind to comfort the clouds. May those words be carried far and fair this night.
Won't you come away with me tonight? /  We can fly past the moon and the starlight
What the water wants is hurricanes,  / and sailboats to ride on its back
And I ride the storm into slumber to swim with the salmon, gallop astride the lightning, and follow these rivers unto the vastness of the ocean, so I may gaze in its reflection and witness the sky.

And then, there are no words. Only the weeping of violins as bows breathe across silver strings.