Overture and Underworld: 
59 and counting, surmounting the sublime and divine

It has been a rough year, a tough year.
Heroes falling and lovers stalling
(waiting to see if they can make a better deal).
Seals cracked and blistered, insistence
shading into ambivalence, future tense
and the dollars and sense of best laid plans
making mock the monk and the steamer trunk
where the metamorphosis used to occur,
hinges now rusted shut and air running out.
Shout and the audience cannot hear, as they cheer
the lights and legerdemain, vain pavonine flourishes
nourishing nothing but overstuffed egos.

My father passed a day after the new year turned, 
quietly and with dignity.
Awake to the end, aware and reassuring
that he was okay.
I don’t think I will slip away in peaceful acceptance.
I will not go gentle into that good night,
the light is too bright and I have work undone,
a daughter and a son or two to look out for.
Wars and whores and spores and sores and scores
unsettled and fine kettles of fish to bring to a boil
as I toil in twelve dimensions at once.
The solemn somnambulances going catatonic. 

On the first day a girl shaded her fade and stayed
just long enough to create the illusion of permanence.
I saw the mirrors’ edges well in advance but the dance
must be danced in keeping with the probabilistic
prophecies, ballistic hearts spinning from rifled shots
that catch on the wretched illusions we accept
as they tear more that flesh, flechettes of briny bone
forming patterns on the far wall as we seal and heal.
As nerves rework themselves, there is knowledge
that the pain feeds the machine it bleeds, deep inside,
a pride of leonine nobility. Ignorant and arrogant,
a flesh in the pan that can span the decades’ dance.

Pulling in the skin and finding a deeper understanding
in words that cannot be taught, armies march in arch
abominations as nations that are and were and would be
see the extent of their spent hatreds and currencies
drawn to evidence their sacrifice of the first fruits.
Roots and leaves, the trunk of willful ignorance.
Steel jacketed elegance, we take pride in snide stutters
as we utter the words of our own damnation.
This life is not the point of life, but cowards cower
and the flower overpowers us with a perfume
that we consume in puffs of smoke that choke
our shallow awareness, less grief in relief.

Dance the amomancies, make straight the way, play
a game that is never the same. Quantum chess
where every piece embraces chaos theory, pawns
spawning kings and queens and the occasional princess,
whether or not she accepts the golden slipper I slip her.
I am afraid to put my back into it, afraid of being dismayed
and disappointed by the end result, for I know the nature
of the nurture of the world is a complicated thing
and Bragi only brings the nuance to the dance.
He does not choose the band or the playlist,
the twist of the wrist required to channel the fates’
river of molten sulfur across continents. To awake.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.