The smoky march of swollen fire

Authority Informed By Grace

First you have to live a somewhat predestined length of life, full
of experience and failure. Near misses and tragedy make for fine
stanchionwork inlaid with loss and a willing tongue for demagoguery.

As the flesh capitulates, the smell of iron stills the rousing sun. Surrender appears looming on the stallioned resumé like an army swaddled desperately in the lies of its boots, cracked and stirruped with campaigns complaining

by the smoky march of swollen fire. This is the name you must wear now. It is torn like a lanced shirt pricked with an ancient blood not of your taking. Elasticity leaves the skin in waving white flags as the deep weapons of desire

lie themselves down alongside the will you can no longer carry with the same mounted air and bravado it took to make it. The women who midwived your manhood are no longer drawn by the instinct that summoned them without you.

Everything will come to more earnest failure as the middled stories recede into dusk. Yet these are what will bring new eyes and ears to gather amid your tell of sagas and what will keep them close to the tales that seek their departures as the light leaves

you to huddle and fend for the parts of you that can no longer be held. Arms take on other meanings and what they mean they take by some authority informed by grace, hewn in the rough warrants of their color, splintered dearly by the grain of their embrace.

Old does this to a body. Days lost to the underdarlinged nights that darken not to be endeared or endangered by such foolish sentiments as you have given yourself to as if they were some madrigal of tribe, some emblem of clan, that made of you a ripe target

for your own sorrowed arrows. Kiss it all in the modern vernacular that enslaves the words that once danced the page for lark and liege for you cannot now cobble a simple utterance. It is lost to you. You have given yourself over to the worst things imaginable.

But this is not the worst of it. That is yet to come. Somehow, in all of this, you have stumbled into a lapse of reason, fallen headlong and face down into the common trap of errorsome wisdom and you’ve only to render yourself essential and victorious before

all that comes forth to conquer you. I speak to myself. And to you, my many selves. The middle of a life is the invastitude we seek to lose ourselves within so that we might emerge matterful and bright when the darkness convenes to grant us space for that tiny star.

Joseph Gallo
June 6, 2006