Cages: Compiled

Now that we seem to have moved past our first experiment with a poetry explosion, I thought I would conclude it how I used to do it at my school -- to compile the poem in its entirety, noting where the additional poets added their words to the original.

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Eyes shining you offer me a hand, lifting me through mire of my own making
Spirals inside rage self-righteous, you lead me to a white-washed wall
Draw a door

Draw a door.
Where does it lead?
Only as far as your mind can reach.
The unknown beckons.

Where does it lead?
Who can say, but if you lead the way
I'll follow after you
To depths not often known.

Who can say, but if you lead the way
Who knows what dreams may come?
A future open wide
Why do we open doors?

Let me turn the handle. Myself. Push through.

"You can be. Anyone. Do anything."
To prove your point, you built me a glass ceiling
Then shattered it, so I would be free
Laughing crystal slivers rain,

Laughing crystal slivers rain, crown me in glitter petal shards.
run fast and grab something, anything
sharp.
Quick, before I envelope such fractured light. In trying to heal, I poke and cut.
With eyes Magnified I cannot stop to find the problems as the crystalline seeds blossom
into seventeen perfect replicas of your left iris--Dark, and filled with swallowed possibilities.
Ferocious stranger of mine, dissolving into resonances,
and shimmering with offset oscillations,
you have left in me a piece of you.
But are you a hornet, or a bumble bee.
or a simply crafted wooden sculpture, being torn apart by termites.

crown me in glitter petal shards.
Distant and safe you watch.
I parody St. Sebastian,

I parody St. Sebastian,
climbing high among the boughs and limbs,
and hands of good people—
you whom I have known and changed
and loved, and brushed my fingers
past your faces that you may
know the stars again,
and speak to the ringing of halos
that flutter
past your once imprisoned eyes.

I dance through the veins of town,
las vías de las villas españolas,
I weave a ribbon through your windows
a mosaic of punctured names
scattered one by one across the catacombs;
I wave away Apollo's blackened hand,
and march with your sons
and daughters
into the fields of thunder and lighting.

And from these branches
through swollen slits of light
I watch
as archers lift up their bows,

As archers lift up their bows,
arrows do nothing:
The emperors club kills me.

pull taught their strings, and sing
the strains of violins, (each note
pierces with its graceful flight);

With every breath I know
the music is for me, and I
drip liquid rubies.

drip liquid rubies.

I gave you my heart, I suppose.

I gave you my heart, I suppose.
I did not know
You would want me to come and pick it up
When you were done with it.

I did not know
You would be so careless,
Leaving it here and there, dog-earing it,
Often forgetting you had it.

I had this shy notion
Of you keeping it safe and warm
Nestled close beneath the covers.

You grew tired of it;
You moved on.
You threw out the trash,
Almost tossed it away
Like so many old receipts.

Yet when I stood there in your room
Your back to me, your attention elsewhere:

I did not want it back.

It was more yours than mine.

You gave me wings, you said.
Sewed my butterfly chest together with

I've sewed my butterfly chest all together
with straps made entirely of soup-stewed shoe leather
butterfly patches and butterfly stitches
the scars are still burning, the rotten flesh itches

To creak my neck forward sends head-spinning pain
through cold coils of copper I've hooked in my brain
I look down my body through eyes dried and wired
and electrically flex muscles long since expired

One leg's from a dead man; one leg is a wheel.
I've a cranial disc made of thrice-folded steel.
I've no nose to speak of, but that's just as well,
since I'm made of cadavers I've no wish to smell.

A mortal no longer, I've shed my old skin
passed through death and returned, transcending my sins
the police, when they killed me, my spirit unfettered
and thus I return, all the stronger and better.

I lurch down the stairs, my sucking chest heaving
to wish all the village a... memorable evening.

Dark criss-crossed child crayons
"I have given you wings. Fly"
My breast, empty. My wings, fluttering, fettered.

No one hears a heart when it breaks.
In silence, a storm.