the dust

collects in piles around the edges
and cracks of this dream, broken again

but not by the stories that
haunted yesterday

here is a new breaking, a new
crumbling off of dry pieces

like learning to hold a name tender
in the center of your soul but not
letting it infiltrate the secret places
reserved for fiercer syllables and

learning to let these names that run go
even as they leave with the best cuts
of what you have grown with tears and groans
like a mother pushing pushing pushing

it’s standing still even as his spirit
assaults you so purely with its exuberance
that you want to lose your senses in his sounds
so freely burning the gray in the atmosphere–

but years of dust and cracks have made us
cautious and more fragile than perhaps we
prefer to admit, and we don’t run so blindly into
the shiny carefree promises offered by less

dented souls–i would regret this dust
but for a careful knowledge of riches hidden
inside things broken, a peculiar hope when
all i desire is for these things to stop breaking

so i sing His prayer and wait
with light opening inside me,
for heaven to come on this earth,
these bones and flesh, this dust