it was a near death experience

red working grownup tossed with tables beneath lanterns shown up
to cross the angles of where we intersect in geometric development.
Picasso showed up to teach us humanity on a canvas while the Nazis
throw up their hands like counterparts of weapons into the flames
where they burned books, the same flames that overtook their lives.

And angel, all grown up, and divine with catacomb mind, and demons
blown up with ancient holes for darkened eyes. Theology broke up
with love affairs long before we had drank our wine, and tell me
will you grow up and become masterfully inclined?

Because Guernica is slowing up, pictured in relief across the borders
where the winds caress the disease of nationality, where we bend our
spoons on prison bars and break up sweet releases of shadows, the darkened
worn out depletion they call getting ahead while going beneath.

Water is poisoned with someone's hiccups,
darkened clouds burgeon beneath flags shored up
to make it seem like the country allied with belief.

I am not a messanger, I am not what showed up,
I am wordly worn out with a kingdom torn out
of tissue patchwork strengthened with iron framework,
I am darkly light out and burning holes in ancient
ceremonies with sunlight's soft relief.

You are defined by grown-ups, you who would leave
to dark cities, you who believe in light as allied
with belief. Break chains with plastic knives and
steal links to casual times in the boardgame of
some earthen memory.

And how language blows up, grows out of what showed up,
is undiminished by the writer or the reader, but drinks
from slight rivers returning our wellspring in incrimental
dribbles down our cheeks, well some call it crying and some
think they're dying, but life is beginning with what rustles
from beneath the frightening scrape of decaying leaves
for beneath the morass lies sprouts of answers, lies the soft
scrubbing of willow bones placing polyp leaves in the skies
conspiracy, in the truth of motive, in the delivered show
where the honor remained strong even among the worst of thieves.

Candles blow out simple light now, but billowing sheets cast
their vespers across the cathedral of the sky. Ancient memories
of childhood break out, and now we seem to know what we believe.