"There's no pilot light" the singer said

"but nights like these still burn." I laid

Across newspapers ripped and spread

And stabbed like signposts through my bed

Until a symphony of laughter sped

Up to sound like violins

Lured me to the open window

I stared through buildings painted blue

And bathed in buttermilk. The moon

Hovered like an empty room

I could have spent a lifetime in

But even stronger was the cobblestone

Chorus, like a siren's moan

Crying "give the street your skin, kid."

But my smokestack eyes withholding rain, oppose

Another burning wheatfield full of crows

The magnifying glass is lost or misplaced

So take this portrait from outer space

See how the monument swallows the speck of dust

While the weathervane powders the roof with rust

Until the whole junkyard's riddled ruin

And the story of the heart's communion

Is like the leaf of dew that tried to drink the typhoon?

A bullet backed out of a gun

A ray of light pierces the sun

Rewind the film and see the frightened run

Straight into the den of the crouching lion

Holding hands and smiling. Once

You're there you pray for lightning

Lazarus, you are free now to die again

And cassocks flowing from head to toe, conceal

The bruises and the burns from where we kneel

A match scratching a wall devours

The darkness for a moment and tires

Or so many past flickering futures

And has the decency to disappear

While thieves and aimless gypsy bands

Keep and polish the queen's silver hands

Saying "the life we cannot touch, we choose to feel."

"War is the horror Peace anesthetized,"

The oracle's iron lungs decried

"The slings and stones we keep asleep inside."

Meanwhile headless corpses take no sides

Spastic banners carve up the skies

And the translator's gifted tongue decides

Just where the difference between two opposites lies

Is it in the pocket mirror where every tear is rehearsed

Or in the soaring bird's eye view of the scorched earth?

I thought if I could curl into a ball and roll

Out of my skin I'd discover a soul

Instead of a scaffold around an impulse

I looked for a target but found a scarecrow

Which swallowed anything I fet it whole

Until I had nothing left but vestigal

Memories, redolent and rainsoaked

And that's when I finally reached the egg

Where I couldn't think or feel or beg

To be reformed or reborn. Instead

I pecked, lurched, cracked, clawed, and bled

And emerged blind and raw to feed once more

On a mystery unfulfilled

Where every answer waves within a sea of riddles

And the cicadas forever throb on the fringes of the lens

While I dance upon this shifting pile of skeletons