The girl from nowhere. The girl at the side of the road
with her bloody muscled heart pulsing in the palm of her hand.
Some dark-eyed hitchhiker, stumbling through the woven streetlights,
mosaics of sputtering dreams drawn flush with the curb.
Oh, she of the swollen dark eyes and a gouged out nervous system,
falling to her knees beneath the pale full moon,
grasping at a wish through the gaps in the clouds.
The church’s roof is caving in, and the sapphire
shaded sky is falling through, and the sporadic dismal pews
are packed with dreamers. It’s like, love is larger than we’ve
always made it out to be, it’s in the room with us, it’s smiling
down from the heavens and it’s singing out from the rafters
and it’s leaning over your shoulder. And it’s out there, on that
forgotten road, coming up from between the asphalt and packed dirt.
Journeys end at an intersection, tripping over the fault line,
cross-body of intellect and invention. Journeys end during the
first exhale of winter, breath turning to a puff of smoke. Like
the sunrise over the dead end, an elegy to all the things we wanted
to stay, a drawn out pause. In those hollow catacombs, I am out
with my torches, following the spools of the road, a trail of scarred
footprints in my wake, the girl with no church and no country and no chance
beyond that promise in the clouds, that undying, unrelenting, unyielding light.