Rumbling

The flight of my desire
across the airy lights of dreaming,
across the starry dreaming of wonder,
fire that consumed me without pain,
where I reached out into the expanse of imagining,
hand wet with the dewy dawn I touched
where beginning began,
where ending fluttered away,
and I was nowhere and everywhere
in the prophecies of stardust,
understanding in a stream of inklings
why meant to be meant me.

I say the purpose of all doubt
is lost to those who have no wish to be wise,
and the houses of our souls
overlooks such grand chasms
between even the empathy and experience,
but I believe that we are similar sounds
in some of the deeper notes,
for I, too, am oft skeptical
that any of us ever had any hope,
that any of us in truth ever won:
even when he had it all and a half,
how many the times when the love was empty sugar,
and success merely a cookie shell
of a house that crumbled open to a hollow echo?

In stupid reaching, splendidly have I failed,
and though spit into the spillway rocks like contagion,
such heartbreaks I recommend to anyone,
for glorious they can be,
that kind of headlong tragedy,
for in such dirty ovens hearts are forged,
in such stark waters steel spirits tempered,
and I could not dream to cook
music sweeter than the scales of gravity measure
if I did not know that from so far down
can one lurch forth with the barest knuckles
and with the greatest of heaves
take wing above it all,
to sing like the Star of Bethlehem itself.