What is louder than a sigh
of doom before the rain
when it tastes like despair
or the perfect memory
and winds saturated with
the will to destroy, to
spill themselves like devotion
upon everything you were so sure
actually mattered?

You show up because it has—
you heard the call of the infinite
in thunder, branches in flight
and trilling frogs
waiting for glory.

There's a swarming city,
a world actually,
80 feet in the air,
swishing madly without me:
an applause of leafy happiness
and untouched faith where
I am not invited.

The private citizens of
wooden empires have seen this
enough times to know
devastation is birth and
terror is life,
and I too should know it
by now—

I'm not the body I travel
inside of on this human adventure
or the pieced-together persona
straight out of society's
central casting . . .

So beautiful,
this false night of rage, this
crumbling palace, this darkness
I wasn't aware of
oiling to the surface.

What is more cleansing than
an avalanche of sky and raw truth?

To be so perfectly annihilated,
so angelically shattered,
so mercilessly empty,

so new.

Patricia Joan Jones