A Far Away Lyrical Star Poem by Marc Creamore

As we draw uncertain breath into sentient lungs,
writing words of plasma, phrases laced in
haunted robes.

As we continue to witness the seasonal change
of our loved ones, some passing over,
some reborn into the poverty or avarice
of nation states, we tremble...
stuck like wingless dragonflies, wings longing
to taste the ether of an orchid scented wind.

Yes we tremble, sometimes dancing sweetly,
sometimes stumbling through various mythologies,
hell bent to make a difference
on this weary old planet.

We play our music on worn out instruments,
open our voices from the throat of splintered
bodies... and there is a foreign weather
battering the landscape of our souls as we cry out
for someone to hold us, to caress away all
the horrific water from the dark, dangerous well
of awareness.

We can hear the distant bell ringing from
a cathedral of untranslated language,
it lures us into the fullness of metaphoric flowers,
as the soft dew of verbal connotations covers us
with ambiguity at dawn.

A puddle of tears falls down a staircase of cast away
sheets of paper, our pens bleed ink from the depth
of our eyes, wanting more, wanting clarity
of vision, wanting a chorus of angels to bless
our ears.

But the pitfalls of expression rides in a rickety boat,
our linguistic oars battered by rocks of self doubt,
causing many of us to escape behind the veil
of false gods, a cancerous vanity, hallmark
inscriptions or an alcohol induced stupor.

Must we be the wreckage of dusty libraries,
falling face first like Li Po into a liquid
hallucination of the moon, must we lie in
the dis-eased sheets of John Keats, starving
for the affection of a perfect phrase?

I fear that the last train just left for Bohemia,
bearing a collective of literary ghosts toward
an only imagined Xanadu, Rimbaud running guns
upon a sorrowful shoreline, Sylvia Plath
and Mayakovsky madly laughing from shattered
window panes, Shelley drowning in the depths
of an unsympathetic ocean.

But the night, it always calls... and with lungs
blistered by the mortal pain of livingness,
the poet continues to rise up, sings his heart cry
out into the universe, generation after generation,
until his soul evaporates and becomes a particle
in a far away lyrical star.