Song for the Long Road
I thought for sure that in the gaps
between my fingers there
were fairies who
made their home.
The years run on into eternity
until they’re over and it’s like they were never even there, and I wonder why I
didn’t sip from the fountain before
the water ran dry. It must be torture that joy is wasted on naive eyes
blind to the minds of giants
who tower twice as tall,
that the band-aids are peeled off so
slowly, slowly, until
scratches cover limbs like they’re
carved into prison walls,
strangers to that phantom called
healing.
I want to know why everything beautiful is gifted to those too childish for gratitude, why there can only be hope where there is ignorance, why I had a heart that could
understand not itself nor
the redness of
its blood.
My eyes did not really see
what hit them,
but fragments—scraps
filtered,
churned,
pounded
and pieced into a cracked mirror of the truth.
I can only live when
there is no such thing as the future, or at least only a hazy ghost of it with the brightness cranked to the highest setting;
I have learned that the end of the world is where it starts, because it is
only there that the reality
sets in, that I see how my life is already petrified in silica and I realize
I should have spent those days that fled from my grubby hands
breathing the air before it was swallowed by the sea,
when I was an Icarus with wings of wax that could not melt.
Now I only have those feathers that cannot fly, cannot do anything more than soften into the ground,
sink my shoulder blades
into dirt—
or whose tears I can smear onto my face, to sculpt a mask for the judgment of some invisible gods who wave their hands and throw darts at fate.
I do not want to call it regret, though, because then the bliss would sink acid-blue all through my bones.
Did you know wishes are just
the babble of passing gusts,
and fantasies only
spangles resting in the
dark sand of riverbeds?
But nonetheless do they not seem to caress our skin so seductively
when they whisper over it,
and shimmer so lustrously
at the bottom of the water as they catch the million lights of the sun?
Like the children we are
we compose our songs in the corners
of these miracles, under light
that runs from the sun’s grasp;
we make promises of our
pink,
white,
yellow dreams,
our sweet insanities like candy at midnight, when the quiet is so delicate
that ten thousand cacophonies couldn’t shatter it. We are fools, ravishing fools,
graceful in our clumsiness
and powerful in our inconsequence— we are illusions,
miracles
in and of ourselves.
But like all illusions we
must fall apart, and when
the splendor, grace, power
inevitably melt into puddles at our feet, we’re left naked—fools, deplorable fools, clumsy, inconsequential,
terrified of what we’ve always been.
In the end it doesn’t change anything.
(Does it?)
So can’t I have a little taste, then?
Can’t I be a child again,
just for a moment,
before happiness takes pause
in front of my mangled eyesight?
I already search every fraction of a second for the sliver where the bittersweet
shadow of cotton candy will brush against my hands, because I know I will pass over it if I forget to check, and
already destiny has rested itself
on my unsteady shoulders—
but more than anything
I still want to fall into those cloudy
dreams I had at midday
and hear the songs drifting over the
whirring of laundry machines;
I still long to sit behind a rusting
fence and watch the sun slip
out of hiding as the orange wind carries the upward-winding smell of birthday candle smoke
past the ferns and the grass and into the crevices of my wavering shadow.
I cannot rake from photographs the things my heart has lost or scoop with
desperate fingers from the fountain of youth, but I can search for the stars that do shine and run after them until the soles of my feet are worn to nothing, and I can watch the moon as it lingers
beyond the reach of the not-yet-red morning, singing for itself and for all of its children, those lonely, night-struck wanderers, always singing the song for the long road.
