cruel silver

Cruel silver
Moon
In a tiny fragile sky.
Thin shiver
In the trees- trees as in
Fingers
As in thoughts
As in unmet with parallel dreams.

I wish I could speak.
I wish I could draw that deepest breath
And then die like an empty cloak full of tainted dust
Before the man inside can see;
Before the man outside can have the chance to ask
-Who am I?

Who am I to sink in below the world that's broken and paid for
And still want to breathe?
Who am I to sail between languages and want to go un-noticed?
Who am I to want to find the words?
Who am I to walk alone and not invite the curious perpetrator,
The curious death- being shot down from below,
Being pushed from behind
Having gravity.
Who am I and my madness
To share an arsonist heart?
Who am I to want to find the words?

Who am I to own this beauty-
This swerving conspicuous ghost
This sublime impetus,
This crying shame,
This oblivious swagger of an enthused infant's newly driven feet.

Who am I to stage this tender war
And dare believe I might not lose it?

Cruel silver
-the infinitesimal feat in portraiture
The worried startled moon
Reflected in man orbiting moon, orbiting sun, orbiting man
Orbiting himself and
Those who orbit him. Reflecting spiral orbits- nothing concise, nothing remotely satisfying.
Man orbiting himself
And of all most fervently
Those who deny him
The answer
-Who am I?

Cruel silver
Hopeless immaterial menace
In a damp black pool,
A spool of tight, coarse and self-demeaning hunger (-strangers on the street all know the raging game of look and look away-)

Cruel silver
Why the emerald iris
Around the dark dark
Unmothered daughter?
Why the implication
Around the mortifying, the deep, the essential, certainty?