To the Glory of God
To Gweyneth, with Love
Flags rise above the cloud wall
They are seen by dead birds, welcomed by sailing planets
Boots stick to the dirt as hands cripple under scholarship
The gun I hold could kill my soul
Babies in cribs could be saved
Love and forgiveness are a clear mandate
Billions of feathers burn in the night
Stars are protected by torpedoes
crying out into the dirt in the sky
Nets cut into the strongest hands full of fish
Suddenly birds are in the nets counted with kisses
Ecologists kiss their hands to care about the birds
Buildings try to tell us to not let them scrape the sky
They plead with us that they aren’t born
Demolition experts absorb the pathos like tears on an empty ice cream bib
We raise the smoke We comfort our forms as the poetry of our beauty
Destruction is something of nothing
Care is not the death of darts that sting our hearts
But love is often the sensation of pain
Being bad need not dwell within itself
We can clean our castles
Birds can smile
Care is the life of songs that sting our hearts
Chess pieces fly across the room
Metronomes echo our hope
Photographs make bricks become anything and everything
We cannot strive to not be something
We can only strive to be.
The greatest death is when a hand relaxes to release a bird
The only life is to see that it cries with joy and its heart swells
It sees that when apples rot, they spread rot
It is as if knowledge has gravity
Investigation and scholarship are not the same thing
Rot spreads and one missile takes down a temple of thousands of years old
Smoke clears but ever more clouds are the rivers of our hearts
Walls only reveal heaven
Vicious winds pelt quills
Fear spreads like money; green things on the wind.
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