Creeps is a pejorative term, its use clichéd —
that, is the way it is. Its use is meant to draw your attention
to the quiet oblivion that structures your knowing.
This is the moment we make the undoing
and join together. We fall with night’s dawn into azure jet
curtains. They billow and reveal an infinite heaven
traced in needlepoint, each star the story
that God’s invention exceeds our imagination.

It is the absence of things that informs us,
that which we thought we needed to know
was never enough and it wasn’t what we wanted.
The charcoal lines of bare trunks and branches
etch perfect reflections of what lies beneath us.
Each rose bush wrapped in canvas, each twig reveals
the layer beneath that is hidden and forgotten; they
know we have drifted into the time of dreaming.

The land of our dreams is an uncertain landscape
because it is so familiar. It looks like a place I know
well, just like my street, the same path to my door,
smells of my kitchen the same as I enter my home.
But it is an illusion, and I like to believe I know it
and can ignore it. Oblivious me; histrionic me; I
must be brought to this window to look through
and see in relief the panic I feel. Roots dangle
from the sky, communicate a blind, dumb deaf scream.
I shudder, feel emptiness press against me, tremble,
convinced I am collapsing, conquerable. They scream,

“Some mercy, tell us what’s the story, is this just me,
or is this a mutual hallucination?” We look into the mirror,
cross through into winter, watch its approach, a veil between us
and the starshine of love, those birthing in the wasteland.
Take this sign that in dreams we are kings, hold keys
to treasure that is ours to give. We kneel and worship
to finish what we started a lifetime ago, this moment.
The curtain surrounds us to conceal us, now reveal us.

The dissolution of our wealth was accomplished with a palette of fire.
We counted gold orange scarlet in our possession
We choose to tell the story in our fashion, but we told the story.
Our witness, our testimony, our contract, our dream
to face the rise of the moon, timbral shell in a landscape
become interior stage, and through a bleak window
winter approaches, set in diamond, trembling, naked root.

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