Dark Matter Revisioned

Sometimes words kill you.
Death by empalement
or flush cheeks
as the metallurgical spike
hurtling from a burly, invisible hand
meets the unexpecting stubble
of the face inside of the face.
Piked to the other shore.

Sometimes words are the only thing
that save your life.
Them, & the oceans of emotion
chained to them
with tangled clematis.

Then there's the little boy so full of it
who explains to you the adult nonsense
with zeal relaying what he's heard
"the car has a bad carbor-a-tor."
His voice chewing the last syllables
with unreserved excitement
as if he's told you about a dinosaur.

Sometimes
a man knows there is no death
but the death in lesser choices.
This man tries to take sense
& intuit a reasoned path.

Her footfalls his
on into cosmos,
stars ablaze past retinas.
Blackholes
full not empty alone.
A wash of light & occasioned songs.

Sometimes a painting visits,
lines a window to a special time.
But all we seem to get is
more tracts of dark forest etched in
replete with attendant monsters
& there--- that place, that slightest edge
at the path's end
(as if the path could have an end)
a smattering of light.
Magical shapes barely exposed
on into the framed edge of the canvas
(where the darkness parts the field opens)
opening onto the age
we have to create for ourselves.