Broken Air

Broken Air

Clouds shrouding San Gabriel peaks
warp with burning force amassing
in the ink-depths where darkness seeks,
eats stars, meets night’s hellfire passing.

I thought those cliffs steel-infused rock
until the crudely carved crag-words
began to melt, their stories unlock
in time’s inferno of lost chords.

All the world is ice and flaming
fame that blazes through forgotten
words, unspoken, unsung, fading,
resigned to the void, the rotten.

But not where broken air rages,
the writhing fire of the spoken,
rising with the ink-stained pages
from the writer’s soul, bared, broken.

She stands now in mountain shadow,
setting his tortured words alight,
torching the night, her eyes aglow
with the wrath of the tiger’s sight.

As looming leech forces bombard
bounds of crushed creativity,
see the darkness wither and starve,
cracking world’s connectivity.

Constricting artist’s expression
like Delilah’s blackmailers,
avenging Samson’s oppression,
the free mind’s sly, sneering jailers.

Gouging out his pride-soaked eyes,
like Gloucester’s blank, weeping sockets,
blinded by repressed who rise
against repressors like rockets.

She stands now on parched plain, resolute,
solitude searing with stark song
of her serenade, her salute
to the lost, the lonely, the strong.

One moment cloaked in frozen tide,
then sunrise erupts into sky
as four figures step to her side
with golden cascade of dawn cry.

A mighty wall of rising chords
beating back the shadows with flames
of rage, fire arrows, burning swords,
an armoury that shatters, maims.

And the creator stills, rises,
ink-drenched hands clenched, gloom of dark room
flooded with sheets of all sizes,
form emerging from formless doom.

Her voice echoes back down decades
from the frost mountains, a lost muse,
as each fire note climbs and cascades
through time and tears to soothe, suffuse.

And wreathed in gold light he transcends,
becomes his words, exists in rendition,
as immortality depends
upon creative composition.

She stands now on golden plain, framed
by the fires of her melody,
dark, divine, wild as wolves untamed,
and the song is her weaponry.