black flowers bloom
awakening spaces of night
inside my day
I found another grey hair
today
my eyes strain and blur,
and the letters of my book
expand into blackness
filling with constellations
and on the inner curtains of my lids,
new galaxies take form
and the negative spaces
between words
take on hidden meaning
If you played my heartbeat backwards,
would you hear subversive messages?
If I remain silent for long enough,
will flowers grow on my tongue?
Some would lament
the passing of time,
but I feel it more
like an elevator
that can move
in many directions,
or the slow lateral spread
of the banyan tree
Sometimes it skips stops
or regresses
or even progresses
to another dimension
It is good to be wistful,
but better to be wise:
like the dead,
memories return to the matrix
to be sown among the stars.
Once I thought miracles
were something that appeared
on the neon signs
in Times Square,
flashing a message
with some celebrity
combing her hair
and looking
with a knowing glance
to prove that it was fate—
that I’d been touched by grace
now I know better,
and just wake up
to live another day,
knowing the miracle
lies in taking in
the everyday
without skipping ahead
to the good parts
wishing is good,
but patience is better:
without my presence,
the present is an empty page
and I live in my car
I walk without speaking
I have learned to survive
I work in disguise
I wear my own shadow
communing with the infinite
in a trance
with the inanimate
dizzily scaling
catwalks of memory
and demands of subsistence
on a scaffold of my construction
a delicate structure
of tension and compression
a quietly hovering
question of compassion
inhaling the perfume
of a thousand strange flowers
I now know
why the firefly glows
even inside a jar,
knowing even the sight of trees
is no more illusion
than the forest itself
my skull is a geode —
if you cracked it open,
you’d find amethyst,
a personal Eden
you might mistake
for my own creation
but until I learn
to not claim this as mine,
I prefer it intact.
© Psyche Marks 2006