Books and sketches
Strangers' voiceless faces
Strewn throughout the mental maze
Old lamps enhancing shadows
Rather than illuminating
The amorphous soft landscape
A warm dry wind, an inner current
Coming from nowhere
Reads simultaneously through all the weightless breathing pages
To no one but itself
While quiet creatures
Featureless in edgeless niches
Stroke cold blooded forbidden wishes
'Til they transform
Gasping blind and thrashing fishes
They'll learn to feel their way out
Of the primordial zone
And smokes in the suspended haze
Hope alone
Perched upon the elevated cobwebbed shelves
Shivers, scowls, and sometimes plots
To reconquer her long lost throne
Rough hewn chess pieces
Scatter over the timeless battlefields of change
An empire given for a sacred temple
Of boulder opals
And Onyx columns
A heavy crown
In the middle of my corinthian brain
Unblinking mirror eye
But the reflection trembles with each breath
Tobacco leaves left to dry out
In loose fossilized bouquets
Fresh scars old pain
Ancient symbols carved in bone
And endless oily silhouettes
Stretch out bizarrely
Toward the bloodshot eye
Of a screaming cyclops
In the city where everything begins
And where it never ends
The fog of memories flows low
Above the sacred Alph
The river bends its silver bow
The lapidarist never rests
Beneath the boulder opal dome
In what's left of Xanadu
I make my mind my home
©pharaonica
P