by J S Khan
Was it an excess of love or fury or a desire for truth
that led me down this infernal path alone, unbeckoned,
encountering all these misers, blind men and saints
just as lost as myself, never as nonchalant or smug as Frost
with his nonsensical non-answers, no sense of his own mortality;
This is Lucifer’s lament—look closer:
these shadows just leer out at me!
Obfuscations groping like flames best to be avoided.
Ideas collect like dust-particles on my coat.
(What difference does it really make, Robert?)
But I have prepared a road map from my own entrails
though it is difficult to read, even harder to grasp;
and the highways either slither beneath us
or these monuments scuttle about peering like pillbugs
from clicking windows, rearranging anthills—
but none of this is even the main thing!
(And have you seen the Sphinx standing guard outside the Pyramid?
The desert stretches far and wide and is growing everyday.)
Because the road signs are in another language,
familiar yes, but like the horizon, somewhat hazy,
showing us something not quiet there, inviting us
out but back inside again. Stranger things,
runes arrange themselves like the rocks of Stonehenge,
and these letters form a landscape of their own (or vice versa),
mirages of words ciphering frequencies on leaves.
So where is any actual correspondence to be found?
You tell me. Read the glyph of this expression:
my frontal bones grasp downward, as if to gnaw the brain.
Still a certain tune hums in my throat, a long-lost melody,
distant and trembling with own heart. Alien still.
Who knows? Maybe I learned it in the womb:
cradlesongs before nightfall. But I am content to move on,
moreso every day, because if truth is contextual
I have been roaming far and wide long enough
in love with my own fury and am bound
to catch a meaningful signal on this frequency one day.
So even if I do not unpeel God’s naked eye,
or uncover how the scar on a queen’s neck can cause a craze
for scarves and neckties, or divine why knights must lunge,
all walls rise, all doppelganger priests stare askance,
what messages might you arrange on the winds of my breath?
Will the crane’s wings carve new shapes for our thoughts,
or will the desert sands encroach further upon our beloved City?
J S Khan's fiction has appeared in MQR, Fourteen Hills, Post Road Magazine, and other fine literary journals, whereas his poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in BRUISER, Burial Magazine, and Farewell Transmission. Khan tweets under the handle @jigsaw_songbird.