A Patron of Shallow Light
I don't often greet
disciples
of Midnight anymore.
I'm so empty, so hungry
for places more vast
than what my mind contains,
so weary
of being the keeper
of my own fate.
I still wonder what truths
are concealed
behind burnished seals
of constellations
but I'm too tired
to witness the sequined,
star-coded riddles
that hint at prophesies sewn
into the folds
of small hours
and the flow
of wide, serous-steel veins
that wound darkness
as the moon
is slain in fair deaths.
I used to shiver
anticipating the feeling
of some strange
Knowing
that animated skin with goose-flesh
and eroded bones with gravity
as if both
would seek to diffuse into night
and abandon me
as a pile of human pulp.
I tell myself that I am too old,
too sensible
to make wishes on stars
or search for optimistic omens
among symbolic stickers affixed
to God's great ebon envelope.
Instead,
I seek direction
from the silence of my senses,
in the dullness that comes
with light without depth,
work without pleasure
and I am bled
by symptoms of naked hours
and loneliness,
swathed in the patient void
of bright, bulbous deities
that allow no light to assume
greater clarity or purpose
than theirs.
Copyright © Jean Marble | Year Posted 2009
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