Stairs and Stars for the Lost

Lost in this half space between the floor boards

Of a lace of stairs strung up and down with innards bare

Exposed as entry and as exit black as if there is a cavern below

Going somewhere other than this ascension or descent

Peering in like a Maghreb sorcerer to imagine an alternative

Between where one has been and where one expects

Perdition each or heaven’s breath filtering with the moments

Left to take or be taken twisted child of lagging station

The creature below found springtime as if the fecund soil

Deposited in inhaling all this death sprouted vigor bereft

Of memory, sympathy, or anchor shooting splendid

To express what was not in the shadows

Knowing the bedfellows of survival glaring out

Once the war has ended blocking the things animals do in bomb shelters

Each step escalates the break as if ascent is progress

Perspective in the universe on the arbitrary connotations of North

The creature above mercurial hasty sprite heavy wings up close

Like a hummingbird at night, ephemeral in cogitated hypothesis

That any day which will may be better than those missed

In any the reach is to a substance mauled and murdered

Death has touched in the exit from the egg increasing with time paid

Repent, resent, amend, pretend possibility is not a labyrinth worse

Hoping in the corners the darkness is not a maze within a maze

Future in a sliding drain the Coriolis of the defamed 

Sinking in the rise of a ship flipped down into the ocean and falling from the sky

If there is a path from here to a you and I, the wind to the mast-less sails

Hanging there in hope prevailed, let this be the day of an oar-less boat

Gliding through an ocean masquerading not as moat but the playground

Of bartered prize and argued cause, let this be the wandering was not lost

Let this be a star that did not need be labeled North

But precisely the stair where two were meant to meet, in the now and not

Before or after, higher or lower, this spot or the distracting caverns

Let this be as it is let be into the self, to raise a mast-less sail

To glide a whisper-less wind, to find exactly that which can only be found

By the lost