#t.david.lauber

[tdlauber]

She is the West

I cross her smooth belly of twilight sage and shadeless mesa

through the unfurled ribbon of her shimmer

She’s my mirage, my mystic, my magnet, my muse

She bears a gospel of crosses driven through summer’s arid shoulders

She will not be muted by the strand of steel wired around the tender camber of her parched throat

She is barbed but boundless

We fuse in the suspended embers of desert ash, and in the ensuing bonfires, the East dies

[tdlauber]

They are overcast, bleached by summer’s breath, grey as exhaled smoke

[tdlauber]

I am well 

[tdlauber]

Take me back 

[tdlauber]

The West called, I answered, the East will never feel the same 

[tdlauber]

I am a witness protected in the ramble of your warrens I learned to breathe in the nape of your riptide and you taught me psalms in your swells, The hymns, a collar of cracked shells, still hang unsung around my neck My throat is a picked lock, a broken promise reborn in rust I am the pearl in your ravens beak I am midnight vespers whispered in the reverence of your incense and my tongue is a tangle of wicked heave knots Through the roulette of sunrises I wake to a house of charred photographs Your gaze beckons and I sacrifice myself to the volcanic ash of your eyes

[tdlauber]

Under black cherry skies, an industry of smoke occupies my temple halls in my shimmering palms, scales of my second skin become a stoic offering The willing, huddled naked in second floor doorways, crowd the silvery rungs as incipient martyrs strata in the free burning bonfires of this hellish house they hang like kites of charred lath just before the walls come down

[tdlauber]

I bed in the sacrifice of August’s dying river in the mist of dusky pollen in the mantelletta of purple twilight Here In the cloying night breath, lie whispers of ripe moths and you, the serpentine milkweed, haunt the curve of eroded cobble I, the unintended Interloper clasp the clumsy fingers of your silken floss you, a sigil carved into the offspring of the moon’s pale corona and I, the chaste curator of your wanton desires still, you will not have me So I sleep swaddled in the cradle of the gloaming longing to break enfevered sleep longing to rip the thread of this virulent dream To finally slip, unseen, from the cryptographer's curious eye