Winged Words

An origami spermatozoa

Aimed at the pale solar understudy ovum

Language its inarticulate cargo

Buoyed by wild hope

Consider its legible skin

Flayed corpse of arboreal anonymity

Tattooed with iron gall

Last words or first

Orphans of an embarrassing dream

Map of a desiccated, puzzled heart

Recipe for a lonesome, twilight supper

Grammar, syntax and diction of silence

Memoir of an amnesiac

Last will and testament of the king of a forgotten land

List of the broken aspirations of a dying primate with a mind

Watching itself with trepidation

Rehearsing the postage stamp epic

Of a dwindling biped

Shocked by the black puzzle of midnight

You cannot misinterpret a text

That needs you to massage meaning from its mute muscles

We may be playing characters

Written by illiterate cells

Deoxyribonucleic acid

May be the only script we have

Costumes sewn from sinew and synapse

Redolent of amniotic auditions

Must suffice to shawl our simian shame

As the house lights dim

And we improvise lines

Based on the burbling of our fellow refugees

From the uterine utopia

Where all of our sustenance was piped in

Swimming in seas we secreted

Singing solemn songs to our own souls

Before phonemes floated into us

Wandering, weary into the word queue

Verses, uncomfortable verbal reunions

Poems, eulogies for suddenly dead infant ideas

Until you make scripture of them

Lonely prophets in ramshackle, roadside revival tents

Unfold this wrinkled paper plane

Find on its countenance the chart of a new land

Where deities wait for you to name them

Build their shining temples

Invent their prayers and grim sacrifices

Worry about their scorn for your flesh or food or feelings

Suspect that they are eavesdropping on your whispered complaints

Hope they will cover your works with glory

Leaving you to love whom you wish as you will

How hauntingly, habitually human

The desire to send names for everything

On paper wings into the fragrant dark

Taught to fly by lunatic faith

That they will find friendly eyes

In the glistening paradise

Of understanding