updraft
I am anchored here: four walls and a kitchen
from which a holy spring flows, imbued
with chlorine, fluoride, and trihalomethanes,
words which sound like spells without
the rhythmic bounce found in nature.
That sort is extinct in the wild, overhunted
by the people who brought you industrialization
and other popular products, like AR-15s,
which have become the new birds, their
ringing dirge replacing the songs of sparrows.
.
I want to fly away on the wings of something
other than a gun: public transportation
is dead these days, so I have no choice
but to make my own wings, melting wax
into something resembling feathers, so
.
I can soar into an updraft, let it take me
to the places I can find only in my mind,
where the trees look up at me with souled eyes,
where the sky ripples like a flag as the wind tugs it,
where I can run my hands through leaves as I
pass over, feeling their collective individual energy,
feeling my reality wane as my imagination waxes,
like the moon, whose pull on the ocean is
as strong as its pull on myself, as strong
as the pull which this earth has on it,
all of us hurtling through space,
chasing the marathon of light the sun throws at us.
They say three hail marys but we’ll never catch it.
.
It won’t matter; I can feel its warmth from here.
I can feel it in everything, as if all is light
and infinite reflection: a universe of mirrors