He Only Slept Under The Wind Chime Poem by Bernhard Emil Bruhnke III

I heard a song of a lost messiah.

Who walked with a barstool's enthusiasm,
while preaching his post card gospel...

drenched in a whiskey scent.

He carried a mad guitar named Harmony,
told everyone that 'ONLY THE NOVEMBER NIGHT
COULD LOVE HER PROPERLY! '

Story twines him a broken mirage of himself,
bartering through towns,
shoveling his maraca feet through the sleeping dust;

wondering if the world could taste the eyes
dreaming through his wounded teeth...

On the ashes of noon,
he would pluck a piece of his locust beard
and bury it in the tomb of the rattlesnake sun;
In the savage night, the sarcophagus
under the razorblade sand
would bleed a jasmine fern

(I was told that with a jaded ear, it would murmur the name
of his murdered son)

As the crumbled wind strummed over his aching body,
His head would pound in agony over the crowded avenue of
stars scouring his memory.

Wiping tears on his rusted jeans and
mangled army jacket.....
through all the shackles of torment and scrubbing with dampened screams,
it would never surrender the stench of nights
when the air was
soaked in crossfire.

Once.....there was love
An immaculate cloud of emerald escape.
When it seemed a hand still lived on this whirlpool of blue and midnight...

Now his eyes, an eggshell stare of Chopin and broken starfish,
would toast the moon playing with the dangling bronze star
winking through the darkness.

Sometimes he would look into the wild stare
of the crimson hyena to make sure he was still human.

The world speaks of him,
married to his solitude;
hanging his spirit in old train stations and the broken glass of dawn's violet tempest.

.......Here lived a man inebriated in the presence of an echo..
a degenerate mask wrinkled into the open sores of our misgiving fortunes.

He tasted what prayer would never erase.......
...and in his crystallized future,

he saw himself,

sleeping in footprints.