HabitationOfDragons

I played in many different yards growing up
In many different houses with many different rooms
My youth like a circus packing up and moving
From town to town
Past those intangible playgrounds
Of my fears and regrets
Where the Times lay on my fathers doorstep
And was beyond my small control
Even those unseen forces
That forever shape our lives
Only my insecurities
Like phantom playmates
Spoke directly to me in that secret language
Constantly dashing out to change their wardrobe
Between what I did not know
And could not possibly tell
Until much later
When I realized
That the loss of innocence
Is always the beginning of poetry

It wasn't the bruised hands and knees
It wasn't the black eyes and the bloody noses
The cuts and the scrapes
Or even those punishments
Inflicted by the limits of authority
It was the anger
That made the silence bleed
Anger that forged my noble knights
Protective armor of the heart
Anger that allowed my astronaut
To conquer great emptiness
Anger that enabled my calvary
To arrive in the nick of time
Where that part of me
Saved some other part
And died in doing so
Anger that drove my scout
Ahead into hostile territories
Where that side of myself became
A strange new land with laws unwritten
Where I learned emotionally
The experience of those customs
Or paid with forfeiture across those boarders
Where I could not turn back
I never did turn back

There is a gentleness that survives me now
Which speaks well beyond its reason
To those memories like a texture
Or a fragrance
Or a color
Where time fleshs out
The sound and the shape of us
Stalking our private hold to childhoods end
That if the heart could only translate
Might hear how the saints dwell perpetually
In the forms of our hungers within
For even when our small hands
Have forgotten what they once kept
It is the image in the mind that binds us
To our lost treasures
And yet it is the loss
That forever shapes
The image