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
