Walking through a deranged
galaxy, half concrete, half light,
on my way to heaven,
I saw a pair of bottomless eyes
surrounded by eyes carrying
the flames of ambition
stolen from each other.
And in those torches the city
was a glowing planet waiting
to orbit its lord
(and of course, they were all lords)
while the tunnels that stared
at nothing were like the shock
of starving wood in snow,
and stung like sun-crazed ice
in my own.
And I walked on,
my spirit trailing behind me,
shouting:
But souls inhabiting rags
could be angels . . .
but always a moment
engraved in infinity.
Life muffled the cry,
called to me from behind soft breezes
led me nowhere different than the place
before,
where joy was a distant babble,
waste, convenient,
heaven, in fragments--
a place neither dark nor light.