The Wax Vigil
The Wax Vigil
I'm born from a thousand wax faces pressed close in silence,
each forehead an age that burns out in one drop of honey,
their blind eyes carrying stone tears down in the darkness,
the world's insomnia leaking through veins like hearth-smoke, unhurried.
I'm awake in the depths of a sleep with no border at all,
and I sleep in the light that burns on foreheads pale and bitter,
through the cracks in my mind a faint music comes slipping,
a silver song poured down from the moon, foolish and stretched thin.
Colors run violet over thoughts made of shattered glass,
and time coils around like a smoke-serpent tracing a map,
each second a face that is born and dies in the same breath,
a game played between shadow and an angel its sky forgot.
I search through the sea of faces for proof I'm still who I was,
but every gaze is a doorway that opens on some other shelter,
and longing, a small candle lit in the box of my bones,
drips its wax on my soul, quiet and tender and slow.
Maybe we're only dreams dreamed by some eye set high above us,
plaster saints standing still, waiting for a tired god to set,
and this night we live in is endless, one eyelash half-open —
an insomnia without any edges, where nothing will ever freeze.
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