The Bellows

Vast.  Limitless
the illimitable, the black
hole swirles, sucks, dredges
all of the muck goes in
like down a drain

and in the stretching silent
black the stars look down
implacable, real, existing.  They
turn and turn again on the axis
within - can they feel their
bodies digest?  The knife stroke,
the creating pain?  The clay
in such huge despicable hands
	wielding all there is -
	skin on skin, the seeing
eye, the steel to the vein:
	it is all we have -
the river it takes us
	like cosmic dust blows
in a solar wind
	dry as desert dust
drowns us like water
	fills lungs - the deep
soul deep, skin deep, incisive

	stroke cuts to the bone
and we spin off, released,
	the nebulae beguile us
with rainbows as we
	sweep by, our essence
ground into dust
	and one seeing eye.

I screamed once, silently,
open-mouthed, sent the jagged
edges out, out, in a
straight direct line to the
edge

and one night, on a frozen
moor, in a three-corner
room I heard the scream
hit my ears from all that
beyond - I listened to the
	reverb, the rebound, knew
I had hit the very edge
	and it bounced back to
me from the sphere:  all our
	yesterdays are here - the

	hole in our heart
speaks in silence and tears:
	so huge there is no
containing it, so vast, the
	universe fits in like a nut
in the palm:  it is

	all there is, right here
right now, within us -
	and our liquid eyes, our
speaking hearts, our tears and
our lies, the soles' tread
all the wearing mountainous years
and the trail of blood we leave
behind as footsteps in the dust.

Now, tonight, I contain it all -
all that was, all that is,
all that will be:  nothing
changes, we are all incarnations
of all that has been.

I have been here:  here
in this place.  I looked into
	the eyes, I felt the
knife slice my palm, my side,
	my heart and lungs
and I summed-up all things
	all years, with a single
breath.  Lips on skin, the
moment of warm breath
	on unseen hair - it
is all here, vast,

limitless, the illimitable, the
far reaching spinning suns
	lie like dust in my
palm

	and  in the dead of night
in sub-zero temperatures
the glittering silence speaks
	as if I mattered
	as if my sore sore feet
	reached that peak
	as if my heart beat
	to a tune I could not hear -

and all the beatings to my skin
the unseen bruising to  my
being:  the black and blue
within, the weals
summed-up my existence here

in this outpost of years.
One time my father
	blew out the candles
and flew.  On a lonely beach
I mourned him
and all these hills beneath
my feet, all the sucking
	years in between

coat my heart now as scars.
I feel the ridges every
time I breathe-in.  Take
me now, I tell the sphere.
	Re-begin.  I can be
that scream rebounding
	but breathe it says and
breathe - because you can
because you must.  Regardless
of the clay the knife
	the cost, the dust.

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