The Sermon Of Silent Fire

I asked him why he felt

The sickly sweet threat of death

Offered reward beyond risk,

To steward his bones

And shepherd his flesh

Into a sermon of silent fire.

And he answered me

Through heavenward fits of raging plume

That watered eyes to glassy ruin,

That he was too aware of this hurting world,

With its stale routine of accounted hours

That gave hollow meaning

To the majority who played by the rules,

But beat the dreams

Out of winsome fools.

And he spoke softly

With a crushed snow tone,

As if afraid

To awaken

Phantom limbs

Back to circulation.

He told me tales

Of how God had been painted

In colours of violent strikes upon childhood walls,

Where ambassadors of Christ

Were self pleasing sadists,

Growing fat off piquant tears

From their feast of tortured youth,

For he was not welcomed

At the Great Table

Of the chameleon skinned demigods.

How he cried out traumas that salted the air

With forever scars that dug beneath bone,

As many more wilted flower heartbreaks

Followed after, addressed to him,

Without remorse,

Without return,

Always hot,

Always burned.

I begged his hand away

Where the lone match met the kissing fuse of fate

And said;

“Life’s prisons and sanctuaries

Sit side by side,

And often we leave one for the other

When hope’s flowers have dried,

But up that one way road

Blistered feet

Can touch freewheeling grace,

Near ringlet star majesties

Hovering over streets of gold.”

He looked sweetly

Through my soul,

And with peace bubbling

In his thunderbird blood,

Flew above the pulsing walls

Of duplicitous leaping flame.

Freedom.

Sanctuary.

Eternal.

The rain fell down in dizzy wanderlust

Searching for fire

But finding none,

Retracted her rods of wire and water

Into Electra skies both blue and proud.