Nether-dweller On the Fringes: Citizenry

Slipping away by all of this silence
driven toward a small, dark and empty space along this midnight drive...

Confession: hear these
dreams of the willful heart
shall overtake us and
recreate us, over and again
Over, when reason reinstates
its hold over every sense

To this account of what is
gained and what has been lost,
emerging back to where we
were, once before, and recomposed
Dust seems a far more common
and comprensible matter

I had driven all through that
darkness, racing against the
night wind and those
innocent shadows
that I have kept-- willingly
but mostly unwillingly

a blackening rosary whose
pearly beads are fashioned
by every breath,
to sin again until we had both
become too breathless...

Confession: hear this
memorae; a vacant desire closing
its weary eye e'er too slowly,
and slow to resist those
restless provocations of old devils;
to relent without repentance
for what had once grown
full of such precious imaginings

to retrace those lines within the
palms of our hands, and change
this most familiar and sure course
of every outlaw and pariah, cast
out, farther and further away
to spare us both unto a brighter,
if yet still e'er imperfect world

"I'm going down, down, down, down
I'm going down, down, down"...

Springsteen echoes and sways
to steer away and around, then
back again toward what some
old idlewile that was lost

... such is always the cost of all this dreaming

Confession: hear this, the unquiet
of the mind and body is only
the trembles of the soul, as it
shivers and then delivers up its very
last hope for salvation in a single tear

"We come home early burning, burning"...

Slight quiet, to this return to damnation alley
where I had once been reborn, a'back
and floating within those shallow shadows,
where nothing is truly gained nor lost
but the time you spend, never really
wondering about tomorrow-- as death
will ever be there waiting, patient and
methodical gray hunter

"I'm going down, down, down, down--
I'm going down, down, down"...

Confession: Turn, and returned to
where all those hapless creatures go,
the bitter luxury of sorrows sea
reminding of who we are; tranquilized
by nicotine and other abandonments
of the flesh... I would release you there
if it were in my power

A Roman Candle burns, reminding
me yet again of the war and still wondering
what the hell is everybody fighting
and dying for-- and why am I there
with you, when I should have been here;
fighting and dying for...

Air... from the depths of this sea's
a fiery stillness hovers, flickering
on the mirror surface
and a willingness to breathe all of it
inside, to drink or drown it own
before the light fades away upon
perhaps one last Independence Day

And we are only left with dark that
surrounds us, until the next morn.

Peace,
Po