Wind-Up Toys In the Sky

Between each limping breath the sky pulsates blanched green searing, each day inspired by gray blight, each day the firmament harbors dense, blazing energy, a circus troupe of skyward lungs hacking up the essential thoughts of Winter. Heads of hail gloriously divebomb now, heads the very size of goners. This Age shall never sleep till Sleep pulls us away. No more dimples—no more passion. This Age slipped in an omnipresent thief borne on each fiery eve, born from the millstones that grieve. Come view the dutiful, effervescent Fall— in every other hall lies rubble that dissolves. I wander wind-swept beyond the strewn city of my youth, seeking out Reap to strangle the inevitable with hands still quoting the past. I should rather not live in a world fragmented so; I should rather not live as a forgotten man; cold. I am not the last man, yet I am the last who has known real men and women. I live out harmony's sinister sighs and channel Winter through perma-shocked icicle hair. I see the last black swan looking back just before the vanishing point: wings rent, bill bent, gashes dried beneath the eyes in the shape of what only you may realize. Water is a wish for irony to pass. Clarity's ghost gong freshens my grave. I know that you are dead, dear A., the swarm had graced your life. And here in verse, my love's insane, immortal until Night. Though the past for me is nearly lost, one scene shall ne'er so blindly frost: when locusts entered into all eyes: scorpion puppets, wind-up toys in the sky.