FLOATING ABOVE GROUND

FLOATING ABOVE GROUND

Ever the stickler for the smallest detail,
I listen to the warning sounds,
Like a boat lets out its billowing sail,
Floating like air above the ground.

I am not in heaven nor in hell,
But between the two, caught in the crossfire,
Of my angels and demons that wish me well.
That leave me to traverse this high wire.

I traverse it at my leisure, lost among the ashes,
Of the cities that once gave me pleasure,
The memories that live as brilliant flashes.
They burn and then the flame it ebbs,
Not knowing the road, its curves and its bends.
Like the intricacies of a spider web,
The Teflon hold of my foes and my friends,
Burning the candle at both ends.

I flew too high and peaked too soon,
My soul it plummets from the height of the moon,
And lands somewhere in foreign soil,
Engulfed in a merciless trap
My only pay for all my toil is falling off the map.

Where no one calls and no one comforts,
They dare not to inquire,
Whether my travels have yielded heavenly bliss
Or the torment and terror of hellfire.

Never the gambling man, ever the miser,
Always the foolish and never the wiser,
I wait in my torrential bucket of rain,
My hot coal crazy of emasculating pain,
Crying out for just the cusp of an answer,
The worm in my brain, the cogwheel, the cancer.

I hover so quietly you can barely hear,
My eyes well too quietly to release a tear,
But I am crying on my knees,
Weeping for the man I used to be
Before the devastation blunt and brittle,
That wounds complete my selfish pride
And all my dreams belittles.

I hovered so quietly, you scarce could hear me disappear,
Into the firelight of a lost horizon, into the tortured hemisphere.
I disappeared without a trace, without a wayward sound,
Lost in space between heaven and earth,
Floating above ground.

-Bruce Potts
Coopyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED