The Last Day of April

Hidden Rhythm It was there the beats unique yet somehow steady a clock. Only the melody with all its power blinded me. And so it stayed always present yet never realized until the day I opened my mind and listened. Life When the sky was a dead river under moonlight, I would press my face against the car’s backseat window, and wait to pass a streetlight, where, until the seconds fled, a veil of light would etch my face into glass: my blonde hair would be beaded with stars, a Milky Way of golden webbing. And my pale complexion would glisten like the ethereal Moon, like a goddess of pearls, descended to the Earth. This all before the seconds fled, before they faded like the owl’s cry to the city’s lights. Midnight Stars obscured, wind dead. The street, a black ripped canvas, gathers old rain at the intersection. The streetlight bleeds—red, a phantom eye shifting black into spectral twilight and trees into wraiths. The puddle cracks with rekindled embers, forming inflections of water, a mummer in the night. A Declaration in a Winter’s Night I am an infant of infinity, one who walks against the unlit sky of tomorrow and holds fast this paling ice gale— a friction that plays on my skin and raises rust blood into my pallid hair. A distant star removes its cloud-veil, and my posture turns tall, no more but a person— unchallenged and unknown, gazing into the ally of eternity and knowing—I live.