I love the first blush
of a fever
that makes me appreciate 
how good I was feeling
till just now; 
makes me nostalgic 
for ten seconds ago.

Ten hours from now
I’ll be miserable, of course;
I’ll look back and it will seem
faintly ridiculous
that I laid glory
upon some germ for this, and

if by remote chance it kills me
this will be prophetic and tragic to some
and stupid and sad to most others,

but I’m going to sit here and enjoy
the little rush of warmth right now,
the throat scratch,
the vague buzz of my body
shutting down for repairs:

no matter how it feels,
it’s still a sign that things
are as they should be.

Soldier
stands down
briefly,
puts aside
his magician’s gun,
exhausted from
participating in
disappearances.

Soldier
sits on a riverbank.
Soldier
thinks about how he
could disappear.

After a few more years
of this, we see him and find
he has.
He’s now a dad and
there’s not a drop
of that old magic
to be found.

Dad conjures,
sits on a porch,
laughs at his kids.

Once he knew
how vanishing
works, how worlds
can disappear.
That was
his life, his
riverbank, his
magic. This new
grimoire he’s writing,
these different spells…
it demands laughter,
it instead manifests
and creates.

God says

to find peace
to link arms with it
and ride with it beyond death
one must seek
the one pebble in the one gravel bed
the one rootlet
on the one tree in the one forest
and cleave to them
and forsake all others

we take that as true
we misunderstand it

holy is not
held in the stone 
or the root
holy instead
the search

holy the touch of each stone
we turn over
of each tree whose bed
we plunge our hands into
while seeking

holy even the choice
to say

that Voice is just in my head
and there is no need to search

to just pick up a random stone
and skip it over a pond
point after it and say
that now invisible path
is as good as any