Not An Allegory

After he pulled his fingers from my throat,
having pumped the last seed into my mouth,
he left me dazed by my own decay in his arms,
and the haze of an all-night bender still
smoked its last butt-ends in my veins.

Awake, angry, my wings singed by his deceit,
spent by the passion of our chance encounter,
I stepped into the elevator whose door opened
in the wall. I stepped inside and pushed the last
floor. It didn't take long to get to where I'd been hiding
for so many years before. No bell rang as the door
slid open, whispering my name as it unsheathed
the sea and sand dunes beyond.

The sough of the waves was a dead breath
stale with a fishless salt sea. The silence of the sky
reached into my heart and squeezed a scream
from its frozen blood, awash with ennui and frail
memories of dead end streets. No sound dropped
from my lips, no frozen tear flowed from my brutal eyes.
I knew this as home, the place I'd sought so long
in winged rides below the stars with the night birds.

Then a voice broke inside me, somewhere inside
my brain behind my eyes, in words that the telepath knows,
purer than words on tongues spit thru teeth.
It sang the hymn of my despair, nameless,
proud, brotherly, awake with wisdom and solace
beyond the earth's darkest secrets, sublime.

The sea reached into a horizon without end,
a place where the parallel lines of beast and beatitude
meet, far into the distance of a galaxy securely here.

When I turned back, not in fear nor in haste,
the laughter rattled the rib cages of the island trains
as they slid westward, and I walked down the highway
to a one-bed room, and the broken glass I kicked from my path
cut in two the incremental tick of seconds as the sun
regained its course once more and rode forward in the sky.

(c) copyright 2012 Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.