If all the magic books on earth
Suddenly were blank,
If all the eyes on earth down-turned
Suddenly rose like suns,
Like sons of God from the dead,
from the dead tree of life,
A cross of wood, a cross of bones--
This that I carry, weary upon the earth, a soul and a skeleton-- not one more tangled and twisted and scarred than the other.
We make quite a pair I joke to myself but it is nether here nor there.
If all the love spells were unwritten, if the son of Venus and Mars
missed every mark. His bow stayed by his inability to see the look in the eyes of a lover.
I am incapable of love.
Like a seed planted too deeply in the ground, I cannot feel it, cannot stretch to break the soil, I am buried.
It is not that I am not loved, for I know it is there, but it's like something I cannot reach. The jar of paste on the high shelf of childhood.
My heart like a fish out of water, gasping for blood-- and finding only air. If I could rework this path I would.
How many old crafts die-- how many ancient tongues, falling silent because we don't speak that way anymore.
Once a woman in my poetry class wrote a poem to her boyfriend called 'my angel'
and I rolled my eyes because angels are terrifying, beautiful harbingers of the spins like you're sliding into a wreck,
We all dream of guardians, that someone will save us, or come to tell us prophecies that we must fulfill,
or we forfeit.
If I am the goddess of love,
If I am the goddess of love,
Then all of my veins are
maps to a heart of endless chambers, whose doors are open,
Whose doors are never shuttered,
Whose blood is red curling ribbon, and crepe paper and valentines.
Though I am hers,
Though I am 'of' her,
I am not her,
for everything that I've felt,
for everything that I've written
cannot be heard.
Quiet spells that sing themselves to sleep on pages no one will ever see,
In a book where time stands still
And mortals can be gods for a while.
