Kairos

 

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. 

- Jenny Erpenbeck

Empty, upturned hands stretching out towards the lofty neck of God

Feeling for a pulse, the blood of Him, the beat of me, a covenant recalled

Face scrubbed clean of all the makeup of pretences and pretensions

Life, head, heart lines in need of a re-engraving: authentic, clear, full

Only a murmuration of the photosynthetic, a plosive of sibilant change

To brood my belly's sense of begetting my only concatenating ask

This coruscating love beneath cannot break the slippery surface 

The rust of immaturity cannot incubate emaciation to sustenance

It won't be long before love, the colour of that good, sweet wine,

Bleeds out on the blistering tarmac, braille bringing up the unprepared

Wrapping my arms around the Lord's neck, lifted and carried

A babe once more, the thrumming of adulthood in diapause

For a beat or two, to catch my breath and for gratitude to reach me

And for his architecture of confidence to become a cathedral

In the meantime, I hang this light heaviness around God's throat

Swing from it, launching myself into the great emptiness

Which smothers nihilistic desperations and exasperations 

Reducing patience to the name of an anesthetized woman

These atoms cannot bind me, I am unattached to tidy geometries

Nor direct my desires whose coterminosity has dangerously loosened 

It's swinging on its last hinge, mutatis mutandis, vestiges dissolving

God's ineluctable will, plasma and amniotic, surrounding and sustains

Keeping me in orbit as I catapult through the nothingness of space

And though I have made a great hames of my meaning making

He has made a name of me in his gentle heart levelling his frame

But love, the colour of my braids, is bleeding out on these streets

And it is Malawi day, the walkways are teeming with people and pigeons

A pleading, a kneading, a knelling, a kneeling in the plane of comeback

An inoculation against neglect, rust and blading beliefs that cut in two

The unity of begetting under threat of perpetual haemorrhage

A warm womb surreptitiously stolen from an anesthetized woman  

Schrodinger's womb, only once she opens her eyes, this patient,

And looks inside herself can she know of her womb's withering

The rooms in God's house are many, is there hope of domestication

For this improbable union, can it abode and abide in Him?

Or will this love, the colour of desire, stain the rug in the living room

As I rest its head on my lap? It can't die in abandonment like a stray.

Will he, holder of my name, ghost me and haunt my grave regrets 

sealing Faustian pacts with tender delicious kisses of barrenness?

Watching my now unrecognizable desires promenade further away

I raise a rock to the head on my lap needing not to prolong its suffering

It's just not your time to be born, the beautiful ones are not yet born