Out The Thicket

Jeremiah 4:7

Each raining shard gashes my palms,
in prayer I talk of nothing,
for the scarlet season blossoms 
through my hands,
and I seep blood into my prayer,
forcing blood the wrong way,
I should be clothed with the sun.

I am desolate cavern,
walls naked, in deep darkness,
from my ethered wastes,
come the lion,
come down the thicket.

Belly full and foul with fissured reflections,
a pregnancy that tears through the sky,
the inner thighs of the mountains shiver
watch cold water flow,
feel the morningstar's dew
glistening upon the valley's long legs,
weighing down my waking eyelids of stone.

Follow the iron lion through my thicket,
reach nether dusks borne by the blood tide,
gushing through the arms,
place an ear to the dark earth,
hear Babylon pounding 
through the veil of soil.

Nebuchadnezzar tapping out to
the galactic spectrum from below my skull,
besieging the brain,
Babylon rules my bones.

Hear in each tap fatalities, the death-song
poured out as primal flow,
field full of thorns
seed to life
and the lion roams, iron-cast through
eight limbs.

But the sun inhales the charcoal perfume
ghosting through the skull,
and the dread earth in its brutal rhythm
flatlines like dark clockhands upon dusk.

Yet still rising anew as a copper sun,
Venusian shades as bronzed shoals
upon the sun sculpted features.

Spun once, then twice,
released as endless yarns unspooling,
in dreams come to skin and breath,
latching unto the flexed steel of
             thigh,  
              arm, 
     shoulderblade, 
          jawbone.

Now Babylon's open jaw in the sky,
the sun is upon my frame,
upon the mane of steel,
on hind legs the Beast is
immortalised by its shadow
as a constellatory icon carved
into the thicket's witness,
a lion in wedlock with the sun,
Man at last out the thicket,
come bloodied before the sighing stream,
wash the wounded palm,
raise prayer like a million dawns to the sky
and the rivers run warm again.

Great hand, palm of the sky,
thunder down with lightning fingers
tracing the lineages of the mind,
the tooth mind unwound,
the lead eyes turn to sight
as the lion with its mane of starfire,
roams a new road far from
the Babylonian dawn.

A mind floats through the sky as cloud,
and all broken predestinations come together,
in a new river wedded to the valleys,
in prayer, I bring them together.

And can you hear their tone?
Catch their voice?

I was with one ear to my wrist,
they are speaking of 
the lion's solar flesh,
they are speaking of the road:

Long, long road I roam,
by night the flaming Beast
out the thicket leads my bones
to a hill of skulls.

Ay, but life is long.
For now,
we merely wander
through the brain's arching daylight.