Breath's Hinges

blown through broken seals around loose windows;
shade blown by the sun through careless cracks.
my shadow through my fingers. dust and ashes to flesh,
sand sifted through digits fated toward counting time
down and away though i doubt time itself is touched.
one "never" at a time. never to be a castle
or a kingdom, never to know freedom
in its wide arced elipse.

limits. i want my bone's distinct;
articulate - latin student's pronouncing
slow chalked words. tones long then flat
bone's connecting at the joints in ambient hums.
soon, there are phrases; just a word and a word and then
communion. soon there is movement. soon after,
i've grown; weeping silent right at the crook of my arm.
nothing really to buffer old shame in tactile, free float
memory, reeling and real as the fact
of me bending around its distinct shape.

sorrow's a very solid truth in its time, while truth
eludes me time is a very solid truth.
as a child still shaking in the awful, awe full
sin of realizing my own death would come it would come
oh god my god - mine - coming now, even now.

old faces made of silk. finely made. wrinkling easily.
at best, perhaps we all become instruments of our instrument.
choose yours wisely. art. harp. brush. string. another's
skin and bones. wrinkled silk and jutting sounds.

i can remember wanting to be woken alone; by bells. metal on
metal thrown high across sound, then down. deep. an easy weave.
a thread without needle twining through my sleep;
tightening to lift me out and across morning. harmonic,
but lonely, so i keep the single ember blown
behind their backs. my breath out; its life.
its breath out,
my life.
out.