Enfilade
You feel surrounded.
How could you have known
your heart’s desire
was a square peg? After
a lifetime of having
been choreographed for other
people’s motions,
who knew there was a dance
you could fall
into that’d get your brain
glowing, your heart
pumping applause to your inner ear?
Having never been free
to move around, your dream
doesn’t know its own voice,
or wingspan. Practiced
at maneuvering covertly,
is it now paralyzed
on freedom’s threshold,
still dodging light?
Open space is nothing
to it but a sniper’s opportunity.
Does it crouch in doorways
then, afraid of sky? Knowing
that moneychangers & marketing
strategists stoop behind boulders,
cartoon coyotes with Acme TNT,
do you pray for a roadrunner’s
whirl of legs, its dustcloud speed?
Or a sapient urbane rabbit’s
magic finger to stop a rifle’s
barrel? How could you have
known believing in miracles
was prerequisite, & tears,
& vertigo, & open wounds
& a kind of surrender or hope
in something maybe spanning
over you, a strong hand of love.
You who want only to practice
kind living and healthy work
but find yourself huddled in shadow
hoping to slip beneath the radar
of multinationals & megachurches.
you roll petitions across your tongue,
hoping your legs are fast enough
to outrun creditors & critics.
You pray for a place in which the script
doesn’t require you to walk
blind, sharpen your incisors
or devolve into a new predator.
Podcast info: Programming, keyboards, speaking: John Paul Davis
Guitar: Tristan Owner
Bass: Eric Leonhardt Brown
Recorded, mixed by John Paul Davis