Let us wake something
that sleeps between expurgated pages,
tear from shelved slumber’s
sweat-streaked sheets, infinite wisdom’s hidden
unnumbered heat, drop
folios this old tome’s fever-stricken
with (various texts),
incendiary secrets so hot that
their feast will face us,
a sage plate engraved by fate’s fingers, whose
hand-coloured tears we
ought to touch, not only because we should
not, but because we
want, his unbound cheeks exposing the pale
shore of the puddle
where mistrust recedes, paper and knees bent
to receive a look
at our future host, a saviour clothed in
those fragrant phrases
burning in the ashen embrace of an
incinerated
book, an apocryphal work the peerless
and pointless ancient
memory of which never fades, these blades
of truth we cannot
grasp, flames of swords fanned out when we (mis)take
for granted our own
li(n)es, insignificant glimpses of sp(l)it
immortality
we rehearse in silent portions, only
half of life’s story
more-articulate persons perform so
perfectly, our lack
of foresight a sacrifice in the calm
of dawn, asleep no
longer as we rise, souls ill-prepared but
somehow wise, our wills
triumphant, ready to take on what skill
he spared us, (t)his spear’s
fearless gift of great destiny bonfires
of prophetic words
bury, greeting faith’s mo(u)rning with our shared
history’s smoke, folk-
tales remorseless in their twice-told mercy,
granite-toothed grammar
typing not with fists but tonguing with gold
hammers what nails it,
that unwitting and wittiest taste of
magnanimity
this degenerate dandy layers his
stories with, tall tales
remedying with passion what ails us,
crass aphorisms
of black licorice, impure tales offered
as alternatives
to torture by a sorcerer clearing
autos-da-fé of
their tarnished names, clouds of uncertainty
washed with wind and hail
(never prayers), laying a trail of candy
where others have failed,
performing miracles not with unseen
hands, but with flair by
burning bridges and poisoning rivers
over which they spanned,
freeing heretics by reading himself,
offering to b(l)ind
horizons with his sunset’s finest flesh
(its ivory touched
with fire, that rust lyricists pluck from lyres).