"Kinetics"
I am ghosting.
Ripples of sound control this form:
a lingering, gasping spirit.
Now, only an observer.
Never a participant.
I have drifted, a breath,
silent,
into air,
invisible,
unheard on the wind.
Unseen.
The rustle of sheets,
the echo of a fly’s wing.
Greed, covetous rage
devour a frail existence:
This thing is famished, starved,
a yard of translucent gauze;
it paws against my chest, rasping,
“Dye me. Paint me.
Fix my pallid color.
I am not yet gone...”
I,
always hunting,
always hungry,
witness mobile comrades
breathe, see, touch, look, gesture, move,
feel.
Devils stalk within this desire.
These hands,
they reach for them, though.
I call out,
eyes upturned,
arms outstretched,
knees collapsing,
“Take me. I miss this. I need this.”
Pathetic desperation,
as disappointing as
watered-down milk,
weak, faded, tasteless.
Then I hear.
He,
in all his flames and iridescent glory,
comes stampeding into me.
His steed’s hooves pound, slam the earth;
the singed cotton of his tabard sears my nostrils.
My Knight of Wands,
my pursuer,
my tutor,
has found me once again.
In his fevered chase
he propels my shape forward,
hurling my form into the spinning atmosphere.
I take these agitated molecules.
Moved by their voices,
their actions,
their emotions,
the air surrounds
my penitent knees,
my pleading hands,
my longing eyes.
I will spread it thick,
like spider’s silk,
across my arms
across my stomach
across my face:
a mask.
Like I used to do.
How I used to be.
I will.
Again.
(Be)
my bygone era.
