An Abandoned Building

We’ve wandered here from far and wide

To this old building drawn in like flies

Our feet have been blistered and our boots worn thru

And out in the cold our hands turn blue.

Mistaken for children so we must beg like dogs

The masks gave us meaning as missionless cogs

So we watch as we slowly grovel and turn 

Each independent, baby faces so stern.

An eternity later we look towards the stars

Give in to the feet that are frozen in tar

A million pathways a vastness of space

Everything is a choice that you make.

As we wait our eyes and our watches stop full

Our hearts lull slow and our feeble necks topple

Ring-around-the-rosy, so the seasons play

Birds’ nests and babies just get in our way…

‘Stop asking questions,’ a man says bowed low

He broke our silence, we swallow him whole

Daisy chain Suzie dances round yoga limber

Chop her dead-eyed down and sell her for timber.

You don’t understand how it is, waiting still

You sit patiently as tho you had time off to kill

Were you not just a little thing again

When your teeth fell out bloody polyps in sand?

But a man at last hears us and slips under the door

To the cracks in our palms which he fills with water

‘Read you some Liszt and sing you Tolstoy and prose,’

Says he, 'you’ll heal by the time new grass grows.'

Still we choose stillness for it’s all we know

But one little child frays loose from her sow

Like a sharp spring frost apple she bites down and falls

A lesson in gravity and nothing at all.

Into the face of nothing so on we write

Into the dank deep drowning black bitter night

Into the vision and the periphery

Swim till you sink and dust sweeps the sea–

For bones linger in the building wherein we seek

Just something to live for, just one tiny peek!

You wish not for pearls nor sparkling jewels?

Nay, the ghosts within harbor no rules,

Lyrics of sun and frostbite of moon

Polar ellipsis and poets crows croon.

The take in us wanderers yearning as fools

And they wait till we drift up on their sancted stools

And the time that we know is circular fraught

Entwined with gold chicken wire we find ourselves caught

But they’ll take what we give with our fingers and tools

And wring us dry from saliva and our hair to their spools.