i. To Escape Imprisonment

On high barrens covered with white
     moss, small spruce, whortle & dwarf laurel
     bushes, whistling from hills above
     the head, a flight of waxen wings
     pushes us off this cliff into
     that precipice, our fall singing
     of obliterated hearts and
     other far less combustible

substances, how, like Icarus,
     we each create our crisis, twin
     effigies of one distorted
     desire contorting in the same
     fire hypocrisy feeds, we flames
     defying nature until it
     scars us, marks carrying to our
     fathers’ houses where now only

their moaning bones sepulchre, those
     solemn offerings of stone-faced
     sage, sacred ash still smouldering,
     soft cinders of ignored whispers
     caught sobbing from sinister gods
     having always rejected them,
     our own designs binding us like
     Isaac to wild thickets of an

                    ii. By Means of Artificial Wings

unkindness of weeping kindling,
     sweating sacrificial faggots
     abandoned by ravens on those
     lonely mountains dawn’s dew-drenched claws
     top with thawed tears of frost she drops,
     tomorrow’s chill sobering us
     with its touch when thoughts fail, when love’s
     liminal lips press against flesh

as lost breath does a lake’s ceiling,
     restoring trespassed boundaries
     after stolen glances poach from
     stoic anglers their last glimpse of
     life before the ice on which they
     were fishing seals them in, as it
     did to us, ambition trampled
     under the toes of salmon too

proud to walk over victims they
     swim around instead, saving that
     miracle for wise men better
     suited to rising up after
     being swallowed by death’s jaws, from
     the relentless depths of wanting
     too much, thirsting again for that
     parched kiss of wind-worn wilderness.