WHEN WINGS WERE IN FASHION 

Lost on a journey of coming home, a path to who I am,

I face my shadow and freeze in shock, finding all my light behind me.

A warmth radiates on my back, a mere memory of holy truth.

Burned by an old impression of relatedness beyond the hidden door to wisdom, 

I sense the portal through which visions of higher order 

once spiraled me aloft into rapt romantic co-invisibility.

Now I must focus on the all-consuming line of demarcation, 

my shadow and light on either side of a line infinitesimally thin.

The bleeding edge becomes the point of entry to my last but never storied beginning.

I waver unsteady, my breath taken away by a swooning state of being 

captured so well by the arcane art of synchronistic heartbreak.

I stumble forward leaving in my wake complaining, revenging shadows.

In somber cadence an unsteady voice hides within mumbles 

a bothersome chant to the irregular drumming of my heart –

Cubing the circle through the density of useless tears, 

squaring the triangle in a flash of all final fears.

Force and form uniting across the twisting emotive abyss, 

a direct reflection of loss from the stillbirth of Faustian faux bliss.

Flailing in the hidden desert of needing to be there and back again, 

flowing up the tree of love in all its naked sin.

Mediating primal spirit from one to many to one, 

confined in sacred matter, water and fire, dead mother, prodigal son.

Sleeping in lustful flesh until the ascending deity is lost, 

mapping the grating nuances between indifference and frost.

Finding the beauty golden in blinding rays of unconscious umbra, 

full-circle energies trapped in a vortex of analytical blah-blah.  

A tension of vital opposites, a transcendent third and hidden fourth, 

guided by falling stars, but none from true north.

Sophia whispers her warning, a blood moon and rising serpent, the spiral becomes a cube, 

specters dance their trauma, quicksilver in a bottle, the wounded child in the wise old rube.

Light has a shadow and it casts its burn on me,

I’m blind to my joy, what I’ve lost is all I see. 

The lightning path burns branches that once held the fruit of me.

The serpent path is hidden inward where stymied roots encounter the boiling sea. 

No one is sorry for the one with a purpose that seems to make them weak,

Condemnation comes quickly but in ways tongue-in-cheek, so to speak.

It would serve one better to not think too much about how one really feels,

admit such things and bear the brunt of being the one to open the inner Seven Seals.

Live out your time just to see what happens along the way,

Gather no flowers for no one wants your pathetic spiritual bouquet.

What became of the one so long ago who dreamed of wondrous things?

Were they ever there? They must have been for I remember wearing their wings.