Song of Obscurity

Michael Dickel

There is in the clay you are formed from
a language we know to perform.
We cannot wake it up from the dead.
So, we play linguistic games instead.

I’m radically unfocused trying to learn
the hocus-pocus of a life I never understood.
Our ghosts grab at ankles which mostly
just rankles, and the ashes fade as they burn.
The ashes burn in the storm.

Pigeons quietly wing from open mouths—
singing their own private woes they drop
stones from their feathers on couples
in leather marked with letters
I cannot gather in.

I’m highly provoked while drinking my Coke
in the midst of a grand nightstand next to
my right hand where dreams fall into line
behind the next sign that the world will
come to an end. The words never end.

We lost our inhibitions while taking positions
behind socially-mediated lines, while fictional
friction resisting depiction pornographically
aligns the clay in your hands into lime.

The graves are purified, their atmosphere
rarified, while artists fill them in. Spectral
photographers and holy lithographers dance
to the rhythm of gin. I’ll offer you whiskey,
something quite risky, if you would gather them in.

Won’t you gather them in?

You kiss my lips before leaving the room,
brushing the cobwebs with your labial broom,
leaving me hanging like a picture on the wall.
The clay has gone dry while I kept asking, “why?”
I play a jazz chord to honor the world we build.

Your clay sculpture collapses while my guitar
relapses and my synapses explode. The door
to our room has married the floor and together
they lock us in this hole. We fall alone into this hole.

Now the words end the world and the ashes
burn birds while leather stones a couple in bed.

Won’t you gather them in?

Now the words end the world and the ashes
burn stones while birds lift the couple from bed.

Won’t you gather them in?

Bird a-fire
Digital art from online photos
©2016 Michael Dickel