One Breath

To live as a man who knows he cannot root is debilitating

The knowledge that every step in the direction that feels like it should be progress

Will inevitably force an equal if not greater step of rescission

Eggs a man to idle or to curse his every movement

As the immediate scratch of the itch will only bust the pent damn

In time to see that the months into years of hoping for commensurate

Were false idols dangling for Jesus and a dance beat

One was scant of rhythm to keep on measure

The unsaid, the non-attempts spoke the volume of the cavity

Depressing the marital hope into a torrent of decline elected

Yet clouded by the coats of love’s sweetness

A feckless prayer sits in a dresser drawer

The energy to hold memories acts like the belly of a star

Consuming hydrogen into heavier elements realizing time only condenses

But never eliminates only transfers energy into mass

So that one can choose how one responds

In the space of the fire, either wailing in agony or walking forwards as a radiant man

Energized in the fusion of what was not deathly penalty, but awards of promise

That as one was entrusted with the crucibles of what defines a being

He grows into an elusive greatness afforded to the few

Who could pass such trials and not be transmogrified into a tint of the wretch

This was not punishment or lashed counts enumerated to constitute a threshold

To forge a weapon in the temperature of perdition paired with the coolness of heaven

This was but awareness of what was always present

Like moonlight to the shadow or laughter from the ironic injury

This is knowing that the destination has always been secondary to the act of the pace

To set pressure to the heel and to the toe and to act

This is the adulation innate to the being awarded in present enjoyed or ignored

For time is an illusion of prosperity and ruin wrapping the mind in distance,

Yet filling the lungs moment after moment with possibility

That life chooses to perceive or not that there is but one