Love, regardless.
Not only ghosts but people. Even the ones who faded.
Recall delivering letters amid narrow ice-filthed brick-shored places, breath a whorl of futile, fingers iced, eyeing gun-shy frown-marked dogs, brown and surly with an inkling to hurt.
A battalion of believers moaning surety. True balloons. Obliterated grooms. How does your compliance make them come?
“Let Jesus in; I promise you’ll be saved.”
This place amid the human tribe is crushing, our tracheatic wheeze an outlier where birdsong once prevailed.
Policeman. Copper. Sworn to protect.
Ever hard.
You crossed paths with her and thought it better to erase her path.
Such unmitigated hubris.
Not only the path but every step she took upon it.
You read that map, you read each step, you nightmare godforsaken failed reptilian fuck.
“I can’t even bring myself to trust a cop, so why choose Jesus as my guide?”
We don’t want this to grow into a poem by default, so listen, pay attention. Reinforce this. You’re weak and low and appalling, and you always will be. Worthless, I want to say, but what we lack we boost, reshape into what we can hardly tolerate.
How glorious our acts of charity, how unrehearsed. Make this our cenotaph. Our radical, ramshackle, gimcrack tribute.
“What the almighty fuck is a Jesus?”
No longer will I turn away from cataclysm, especially when it’s made, especially once the red-streak gaze, the blaze of shame, the razor-face of naked blame spans the climb and ropes the bleating escapee, coveting exoneration, floating jailbreak, tempting everlasting flight.
Oh baby bird.
You darling fledgling underneath the rain.
“Will you come back at last and hold my trembling hand?”
What untenable schemes unravel and bring you face to face with all things lacking face? What untrammeled endless waterways remain and even drain beyond this thing we deign absentia?
Claim this. Claim your phantom legacy of pain. Let’s not let the boorish blamelords block the meritful petition of the rest.
“I’ll come back. Yes. Whenever I am right, I promise I’ll come back.”
Avenge this, all my dearest compañeros, walk in numbers shouldered by the highways as they flit and dash, reminding them of how our multitudes will some day trounce their flimsy hold, how sheer exuberance will rout their angry grasp, how dreamscapes wake from sleep, how such astonished love surprises overreach, how this damn good thing eclipses all of this and most of that.
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Image © Rebecca Loranger