~Part 2:
REBEL

What was it that imprinted the cosmos into
the beats of our hearts?
The melancholy?
The convalescence?
The inhale?
Its nemesis?
Almost as if Love becomes its own dimension
like time, or a force akin to entropy, but
unlike the spintop-whip of entropy observed,
it carves back into itself instead of out.

The bold one holds a whisper to my ear,
is it you?
A hurricane in the palm of your hand,—
the bishop’s refrain, “What we have,
we have to share,”— it’s everywhere.
Like chaos complete,
Christ in a riddle,
eternity in a the eyes of a dog,
the loyal grow old but their hearts never do.

You curdled the lyrics of a ditty
so incomplete I had yet to mouth the words.
A sharp tug in the throat
like a burden of souls
washed down with spiced rum or a
snifter of something drier; —
you never were the sage, the mystic,
the one who wrinkled water like
it was a costume for a masquerade.
No. More like silk, or thyme soaked in
fragments of rage.

Yet you lingered over words in your
own language, sweetened in the
nectar of desire for things
you could never own.

And we ran.
Ran into the trees, into the breeze,
the tease of a madman at our heels
in obtuse degrees.
The asylum forgets our sanity,
buries our reason, our honor, our minds
in hubris, where bold men make
mockery of our strange desires,
the fires of bold denials of lies.

The cliff-jumpers catch their death.
They’d rather dare than dread
the outcome. We are not so different.
But history
is more profound than
the tales we’ve been fed.
Silence, the adulteration of reality.
If we don’t speak,
it may yet get the best of us.
O, holy riot of the mind.

Yet, rebels will never hold
their tongues
or actions.
The rebels know better than man’s
inhumanity to man, or beast;—
they know, as do we (for we are they),
that silence must be broken
if men are to be made whole again.

•

©2022: Zoëtrope in Words. All rights reserved.