Poem: 12 Steps to Home // Synastry

1.
Reckless children standing upright,

attuned to the racing whooshing of another night.

Embracing a chaos of echoes inside of the cool, earthy air

Like the wind is theirs, our own phantasmagoria.

2.

Or perhaps our boundless crematoria.

(Your hand, steadying itself against my waist, is like a specter.)

But then the whole night sky is a nebula, birthing out so many stars!

And the Moon is glorious and bright, though she pays her requite, always,

Of nectar kisses planted on the impact craters of Mars—as though she has none of her own cracks to tend    

3.  

Mars is this young one’s war-driven father, and I am sorry for his scars,

For the craters that kisses from paler planets cannot cover anew.

But everything is beauty now and it’s all at this one place in time, so let’s not falter over quarreling Mars and our proof of how feuded-over moments can cause caldera.

4.

This is the wickedness of youth,

For we are fearless, jolt-addicted and

Blind, even to truth, as wantonly, we chase away the dawn.

With endless grace.

5.

As Time hunts us with bizarre exuberance.

A dark road takes us out, and on, to a paradise—the world beyond our grey-stoned city,

For which we have hungered.

Like lions in an endless winter.

6.

You were then a magnet to me, now you are jumping on my trampoline,

First fuel to my hate-filled fight to escape this concrete town

Which you have come back to now and I am coming. I am making my way.

I. am. coming. To love. Again.

7.

But I find it inside myself,

Wherein my two minds, which were once in splinter-shaped constellations,

Have sprung apart and placed themselves again into starry assortments that have begun to demand:

I want the wind as it is inside the city,

I want the lit road back as it is taking me to you,

I want the echoes as they hasten by my ears,

to be rooted in the rushing race of nights anew

8

Yes, we are bright young things

Living in dreams, we who romance the night.

But we need more than a blue moon of reverie.

I need the way he made me feel, rushing through the woods

Brush bruises interspersed with sweet kisses, in every clearing.

But it’s not the boy this lion misses.

9.

It’s the passing of an hour, at the brink of night, within the secret spaces in my stony city.

In a sea of blissfulness, on a trampoline that gets us so high.

We are above that murky sky, which is a purple infinite hole in time and space.

And as the warm air diffuses the earthiness, a siren’s lulling song

We hold time a bit longer

By the grace of mind.

There’s no such thing as synastry.

10.

And then the dawn:

Brighter, Rooted in rock,

Brought back under lock and key. (But is your body next to me?)

11.

Looking ahead,

Remembering primitive times;

Cicadas now, instead of Stars.

Some trades are simple swaps.

Her cracks, and his scars,

But have you ever been the balm to someone’s grief?

12.

The relief, to have been in and out of touch,

To know his warmth and learn to live without

And to find again

If I die now,

I will have lived.