DAYS NOW
Days now the whispers come and go
worm words generated from earth,
words of smoke, words of plants.
.
Turn sideways, become thin,
slip between one day and another,
at the year’s ending so little noise.
.
These stars – they are not now,
they have burned bright and died
a million, million years ago.
.
Therefore, I bow down and breath deep
the dead light of our ancestors,
gone and here and gone again.
.
Time is the fat of stars;
seeping in the long years,
other glorious mornings long gone,
distant golden mornings,
other silent rooms, other footsteps.
.
Nothing goes to waste
but slowly changes from what it was
woven threefold into other days.
.
The Magister holds starlight in his crystal spheres
to rot them down to raven’s wings
where seconds copulate birthing strange homunculi.
.
They know the answers only the dead know
in butterfly whispers etching notions,
as acid reveals the jagged web of meteorites.
.
He is old now,
his bones creak like galleons do.
His mind, though, a bright moon in a stormy sky
for he is, he says, acquainted with all the demons
that dwell beyond law and science,
who converse in riddles
and move as if dancing upon other gravities.
.
Their heads are broken open,
their orifices sprouting green tendrils,
their skin, inhabited scrolls
where letters form and reform in curious calligraphies.
.
Lascivious is their language,
exotic and full of lilting innuendo.
Their madnesses are roads untrod before.
.
He reads the books that have never been opened,
by walking backwards through mirrors.
His only sustenance, the tiny measurements of primordial dust
wherein he seeks his own eternal name.
.
He practices the mudras of teaching and of dissolution.
His words fall sparsely in vast space
like birds that fly across a still sunset sky.
.
Their skin peeled back, returned to light
they tend their dripping hives,
honey vowels, the sigh of release.
They climb upon one another,
puncturing their certainty,
melting into each other’s futures.
.
The sawhorse shall be put together.
A new constellation shall appear in the southern sky
as Betelguese, or its ghost, or its future,
Weighs the likelihood of eternity.
.
The world is fire and light
and time is the fat of stars.
The apple winces in its dawn frost,
The sequoias sing to planet’s spin.
.
Clear facts stumble unheeded through forest fires
whilst ungainly notions dress the moments.
.
The alembic bubbles and quivers,
uncertain whether it can hold
the sentience of its own soot.
.
Still the Great Work must continue.
In holiness we are rubbed out completely
imagining new wings, writing new musics.
.
simonhlilly 