A taste of something new

Oh, noble, you, a carrier of the small things, the wood grain
Tiny pockets in all the jackets you slip through, upon a speckled horse,
You ride into my dreams a curtained shade of blue.

It is a crypt of many faces etched, and a place of calming stair-steps,
Each one a choice, ascending.

My knife it slides along stone cracks, pricking into old haggard lips
Like chivalry and faith and crippling truth, this, a place where no one speaks
But say it just the same: you cannot tame. This.

And roots pick through roofs for those delightful departed, they talk the language
Of cycles, of times, and life. Lives lived. Little tendrils praying.

Some days my mind feels like blades laid bare about a cutting board,
Little shavings of metals and plastic and bamboo strewn like chaos on the floor.
And each step drizzles snow about my feet, tinder for a fire I won’t dare light
For plastic burns the lungs, and metal cuts the thumbs, and my mind is made
Of blades of porcelain which grow brittle in the heat.

Firefly, this, upon sassafras leaf, curling into itself with Autumn, yellow
On yellow on black. Veins glowing out through mitten-leaf, and dancing
As it steps across the place, it,
The only one in this great forest of oak, miles and miles of shadow and trunk
Dark but for this, the mitten, the bug, illuminating out one frond,
Yellow on yellow, one leaf on one branch on one small tree, freezing.