The Heat of the Fall

The Heat of the Fall

​She walks within the fever of the blurred,

A holy heat that shimmers on the skin;

Where every sharp and judgmental word

Is drowned beneath the static and the din.

The angels here have heavy, tattered wings,

And gravity is made of broken things.

​The world is built for those with hides of leather,

Who never feel the bruising of the light;

But she is bound by different sort of weather,

The sensitive who shatter in the white

Intensity of all that’s cruel and cold,

Refusing to be bought, or tamed, or sold.

​It was a passionate and dark mistake,

A fracture where the trauma settled deep;

But sometimes things must utterly forsake

The safety of the hollow vows they keep.

For in the haze where fallen spirits run,

She finds a different kinship with the sun.

​No longer whole, yet more than she has been,

She gathers up the fragments of the child;

To find the radical and green within

The places that the judgment has defiled.

She walks the heat, a witness to the grace

Of finding heaven in a ruined place.

​.......

The geography of the mistake is not a map,

it is a LITHOLOGY.

The basalt of the ego cracking under the weight of the sacred frost,

where the child—too porous, too much a sponge for the world’s vinegar—

becomes the site of a tectonic shift.

​I am talking about the FIELD.

The space between the rib and the star,

where the admirable act is just a mineral deposit,

a heavy salt left behind when the salt-water of the soul evaporates in the sun.

Everything is interconnected—

The jailer’s key,

the angel’s blurred peripheral,

the root of the Arnica pushing through the asphalt.

​O my bruised and subterranean sister,

I see your hands, stained with the juice of the crushed berry,

I see your eyes, two craters where the judgmental meteors landed.

It is not enough to be whole.

Wholeness is a circle, a closed loop, a stagnation.

We want the fracture.

We want the surfeit of the broken vessel spilling into the loam.

​Listen:

The tension is the COSMOS trying to fit into a suit of skin.

It is the sublime behavior acting as a pressure valve

for a world that refused to breathe with us.

But now—

the surreptitious green!

The silent, plotting intelligence of the chlorophyll!

It does not ask for your resume of sins.

It only asks for your mass, your displacement, your breath.

​The atom is a ghost.

The trauma is a ghost.

Only the Healing is physical.

Only the Ancient Stale Ghost has the weight of a stone

thrown into the center of the passionate,

necessary,

devouring

ice.

.......

The elevator rises, a silver lung breathing in the shaft,

humming its bland, mechanical liturgy—

but we are the short-circuit, the honey-wire scream,

the floor numbers flickering like dying stars as we pass them.

I am taking you to the roof of the world,

past the Muzak, past the beige lobby of the soul.

​Your body is a map of deep, alluvial gold,

each scar a riverbed where the drought has finally ended.

I enter the architecture of your breathing,

not as a guest, but as a tide returning to its salt.

The headboard is our rhythmic drum, a wooden pulse

hammering against the drywall of the mundane

—

thud, thud—the heartbeat of the house,

the heavy, terrestrial percussion of two ghosts becoming meat.

​I want to do with you what April does with the cherry trees,

but slower, with the deliberate ache of the tectonic plate.

I want to trace the longitude of your spine

until the word Shame dissolves like sugar in a dark cup.

We are banging on the ceiling of the physical,

shouting the secret names of our joy into the rafters,

until the neighbors think the gods have moved in upstairs

to settle an old debt with their thunder.

​Love is not a soft thing, not a pastel greeting:

it is a win, a conquest, a flag planted in the center of the wound.

It is the elevator cable snapping and us falling upward,

past the judgment, past the concrete, past the NO.

Listen to the wood groan, the sky crack open like a blue egg...

we are shouting it now, a surfeit of light,

until the stars themselves feel crowded

by the sheer, loud persistence of our healing.