I.
An ink-bruised hand
cracks chisel against rock,
splintering the fragments overboard.

Like enslaved sailors sent to drown
to the splashing beat of a metronome,
their gasping bodies are sacrificed
just to measure the clock-spun hours
of the poet's accelerated heartbeat.

Every muse lacerates
with the furious motion
of her venom-tipped wings.

She,
a blood-soaked Pegasus,
straining to break gravity's leash
with the worn down teeth of a single human mouth:
a mouth grafted onto the ebony walls of night.

II.
Sometimes
the days pass unnoticed,
the transparent air ripe with reprieve.

Yet soon the void scraper's shattered pedestal
reassembles under the cover of the limping night:
words spill forth like sentient quicksand,
leaving its immobilized prey hanging and wailing,
hanging and wailing against the thickening web of night.

III.
Launched from a Muse's drunken eyes
the rocketing epiphany
slams into the muddy waters
of ordinary thought.

Plastered
to the bare walls
of this empty house
our flattened bodies are mined
for childhood memories.

As the shadows of uncertainty contract,
a crystal island of discovery is revealed.

For it is then we realize
that every child should eventually grow upwards,
to fill the space between the stars.

IV.
A tongue that paints
and sculpts meaning
from the void.

A messenger sent
from one side of the universe
to the other.

As the jagged teeth
of our inner cosmology
carves our cheeks into soreness,
we wince at its complicated edges.

V.
Yet whenever the sun rises
there is something glorious to behold.

Adrift in the seas of circumstance
light itself offers hope
that as the day begins
all known matter could be
arranged in such a way
as to serve a purpose.

At this radiant hour
the sun's celestial bouquet
resolves to a graceful point:
the sweet-sounding chirp and flutter
a bird makes when its nest
is finally complete.

01/19/2008

Posted on 08/19/2010
Copyright © 2026 Tom Goss