The Silent Call

The road crinkles with my word. I am the crown. The gold. I am the ears of a thousand men, a long lineage of horns and stinking goats and cups of blood. I am the road. I am the cave.

The road spins with my sweat, and I drip.

They are the seeds of my power, the spouting of a new fern, the joy of a new wisp of green.

I have seen the villages along the coast, on each side of the path. Always standing, always waiting for what will never come. They have heard my call, my cry, the horn. They have heard. Those with ears listen as though it was a passing wind, a kiss from a spring morn.

Though it is not. It is the call of the path, and only the children run, letting their buckets and yarn fall to the fields, forever losing the signs of their world. Their mothers look for them in barns, beneath the cows, in the stacks of hay and in the silver shop. They never return.

They follow like the rats of fables, coming though they only heard the song and the promise of something buried within the melody. Blind as they are, they see more than the old maids in the kitchen, more than village after village, stuffed with priests, forever preaching about desires they cannot control.

I come with a sword of liberation. With the stain of blood, with cut throats and twisted bodies.
I come, though liberation is made by men, not kings.

The scepter,
the bones of ears and horns,
the purple cloak that promises in whispers.

Come to me, though you move like zombies through a thick gray haze. This is the time, the one chance to reach through tidal waves, through the mess of noodles and the window shrouded in time.

Come if your heart permits, if your mind, for once, cowers in the corners, unsure of direction. The compass stands steady in the center of your chest. Each chest.

Between white breasts.

Beneath a spurt of hair. Beneath the bones of both. Feel it though the cold wind blows.

I am calling.

And I call, though no answer is expected.

Though no body emerges from the fields of wheat and millet.

Though I hear no laughter and feel only silence.

I see the world, waiting at the horizon, waiting for death to emerge through the clouds. And I know,
it comes. It comes and I walk, sending out my call.