Poem: Prophetic

 

Prophetic

 

such unwanted storms.

i became a weathervane of crossroads

in a quandary of winds, whose smiling omens 

carved me out like a trench.

scorpions in thorns and lilies 

roamed fast among rattlesnakes and succulent begonias.   

underneath this orgy of peril and beauty, 

layers of choirs of fossils scraped my 

naked soles into a runesong of whys.

 

i pitied the gods,

had the stamina to wrestle the

most implacable angels.

power and lust lost their darling thrill,

eager to forfeit the illusory game.

those addictions and fixations and dysfunctions 

which kept the players 

rolling their stones up and down and around 

and back and forth again on all sides and tops and 

trenches of a fluffy mountain seemed to me 

such a sparse gamut of opiates. 

looking down, 

my omniscience fleet,

immersed in a sweet flood of bliss

cherished by a mere nanosecond,

i saw love and beauty and care

in ways whose flaws suddenly avoided failure.

i saw pure tears whose glint lit candles as

strong as torches within paradoxes, even though  

eras of sages had argued they could 

never be complete.

it became clear to me, only there and then,

that the rest was mere assemblage:  an unfolding 

of foggy, flighty math across successions of blurry turnstiles, 

so many sad-happy and fickle streams of equation, 

destined and designed to feed the Before and After:

those twin troubled oceans, so hungry, desperate, 

on either side.

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5/26 ... grotesque number of edits

10/27/25 unimaginably large number of edits