Star Day Poem by Luke J. Holt

I am the dredge that strangled the princess
I am the horse who gnawed steel in a stable of wrong.
I learned of you in a powdery song and remember you in galaxies of closed-eye-shape forests.
i touch you, the jungle, and sneer
my dizzy, heated, kaleidescope head and the sheer, restless village of the heart.
i pump you with love s gilded venom and a laugh and fidget come sprawling out in chains

this is for what i prayed
and as so it is this for which you asked
as we drink the yellow sun and lick the blue honey from the sky
i begin to leak molten pink
i have stored these notions so long
they have names, addresses and shoes
they flock to you like drug kids when they smell something naughty
they are boring blocks of feelings bored and meandering with crossed eyes and wooden skin.
this is the ice we have chosen to feed the warm river; this is the book i have shaved of its graying tendrils
so that kings of red and queens of green may waltz,
so that shrieking beasts of white may terrorize your former lovers and badger them like needy phantoms,

on Star Day i channel the me that is young and that loves.
not even one solar arc divides us
from Vega to Altair i scour the milk of eons for the bridge that swings you gently
for the scarlet cloud that screams your name in gassy, useless space.

engine of the soul:
it is you
my pistons chafe and grow antsy for the scrape of sudden stop
awaiting termination
like waiting in line to pay a toll that bears only the reward of passage.

some people love for coins
some for flesh and some for fireworks
some people love in spite of stars
and the spindly bridges that lace them as junctions of gold
some will die on rainbows and wash in broken glass
and some will cry on lily-pads
weightless from my search for you in heaving space black as my sleep.