The Sun Must Always Rise

This poem has been a long time in the making, and I am very proud to return from the writing sabbatical I've been on by posting this piece, enjoy, review, share.

Brightly burning argon

And cadmium flames

Lie among deeply emblazoned

Cerulean dog-stars,

Around my feet,.

They crunch and crack

Beneath weathered, dusty hi-tops.

The canvas worn and faded,

The rubber crumbling away

Like the limestone faces of old men,

Eroded into crags and canyons,

Cavernous mouths

Spilling foolishness and wisdom

In equal measure,

Shaped by the unending winds of time.

Mismatched socks protrude,

Defeated, disenfranchised,

And slumping from my ankles.

Listless despite the presence

Of the great earthly firelight beneath them,

A blaze captured in wood and earth and steel.

Each footstep blisters,

In the early morning air,

Or the heavy oppressive afternoon sun,

Or the weird quavering light of after-dusk,

Like a solar flare lashing out

From the stars beneath me.

I wander among the stars,

A solar traveler,

on beams of light, like an angel,

Like a god in the sky

Among nebulae and heavenly stars,

My eyes drinking in the infinite

Yet infinitely finite glare of supernovas.

It is an experience altogether human

Yet uniquely divine.

To exist in these phantom times,

And breath the prehistoric deadening

In the thick dessert air.

To walk upon these

Fractured shards of liberty,

Fonts for sunlight summer reverie,

And moonlight sonatas forever lost to time.

Yet among the shadows,

Among the repetitious

And rapturous circle

Of life and death and new beginnings

And life and death again

We find hope,

We find love

And we find light.

Light reflected in the stars above us,

And in the stars beneath our feet.

But what kind of madness is it

That a man may see more stars

Crunching beneath his heels,

Than reflected in the mighty sky above him?

What form of wild reverie is it,

That we may walk among the stars each night.

Surrounded by them,

Embraced by them,

Threading through them along the cold steel tracks,

From the break of day,

The withering of sun

And the approach of night,

We travel through the astral world.

I look to the sky and see beasts,

Warriors, and angels.

I look to the sky only to see

The reflections of ourselves.

Like a lightning rod,

From battered shoes,

To unkempt hair,

I feel myself become a dynamo

For another holy trinity,

The fire above,

The fire below,

The fire within.

Each shines bright

With heavenly conflagration.

Each, another galaxy,

Spiraling away

In an infinitely expanding universe,

An expanse as limitless as our hearts.

These cold hours of the night,

Are so silent,

Save the endless midnight

Language of the world,

The crunch beneath your feet,

The occasional roar

Of a battered and broken car,

Along decimated nowhere roads,

The screams of semi's along the freeway,

Running from something I will never know.

The isolation of the night is absolute,

Against the fiery ignition of the sun.

But To see the light all one has to do, is open their eyes.

In These dusk hours, in the quavering light

Of reanimation and midnight hours

Of deep and shadowed darkness,

Where everything is so alive,

Yet nothing seems to truly live,

These Frankenstein hours oh,

They are eternal and eternally fleeting,

And as with everything that passes through our lives,

They must end.

The sun must always rise.

Torrin A. Greathouse