from one

Apologies in advance. Been composing and doing other things, but here's a quick break from that. I'm known to occasionally write haphazard poems. Here is one. Yay.

“from one to zero”

There is the waiting, and the waiting,
and the waiting.
Days drag on, a mouldering fire
exhaling in slow, whiskered gasps,
unable to lift their heads, ears
of cloud sharpened by lancet winds.

I lose myself among the counted weeks,
the soft-soled march drumming
uneven, pale rhythms;
I lost count of the untold seconds

(must be tens of millions by now)

That seem to count backward from
one, to another zero, one, to
another zero.

There is the waiting, the pendulous
shadow green as copper. There is
the waiting.

(I swear this all looks familiar.)

Desiccated days with raspy voices,
coughing through acrid smoke, the
nostrils flared, caked with ash, eyes
unable to open ---
the nights wet with worry, gurgling
sobs stifled by a silence, melting
eyebrows and cheeks flushed, as
though beat counterclockwise.

Then there is the waiting.

The worlds traversed, occasionally
crossing orbits: tenuous words in
maudlin capes, a mock Saint George
with blood-drained fingers; coffee
spoons unfurled in florid bells of
porcelain’s clamor, closing up shop
for winter, trellises as hands grasping
at brittle noon haystalks and clover.

(I really don’t want to leave here.)

Words meant to suture seem
to nurture the wound back to health,
a rapier upending the papier-mache
scar tissue, a gnarled claw digging at
flimsy beer-coated armor;
a footless ghost, wizened, drifting
among the corridors and catacombs,
neither lost nor grey with discomfiture.

(From one to zero, there must be
tens of millions, tens of millions)

There is yet the waiting; it will always be there.

To see the ember fall up into
its wood, to see back into ash cascading
into solid boughs, into the conflagration
and the void of light before it;
To view a brittle brown oval of
an elm denude itself of brittleness
and drink back the tenderness with
which it clung to the spindly branch;
to watch with zeal the cinnamon strands
of pine needles scattered among the
dirt and dogshit rethread the air and touch
a piquant green, and then a wilder
green, and then disappear into the
scales completely:

There is the waiting

And there is the waiting.