Alphabet City

The ground is too far below for me
to discern my own face in the puddle
of rain immortalized. Once I was
a downpour, a constant gurgle
in the drain spout, warm and blue
water flows, banks steeply in foam
before the fall. I plead a cascade
of long dawnings where nightbirds recede
into the day’s cry, a jaunt once again
in sunlight that’s always warmer than early rays,
before the first frost when only a few turn sweeter
for the cold crystal tears that break on cheeks
as tiny pellets of snow on glass wiped clean
on dark roads, by butterflies – that’s where I’ll live,
atop canopies not in them, a soar above the crowd
a cut below, in startling light, not in shadow,
stark, evanescent, constantly re-birthed while birthing
incrementally ascending higher through skies unattained
upon velvet breaths that scour my lungs alive despite
the gasping intake of free fall. Vertigo does not blind me
nor deter me, my bead on you. You are Life, and We as One
are None.

© Chagall ∞