Savage Pilgrim

Sparks flew off her fingertips
the first time they met, this much
we know. It was a blue flame, a red
dot of light. She had sad dreams, blue eyes.

When he saw her for the first time it was over
before it even began. So terrified was he
of the process, well not the process,
but the end game of love, well,
the Savage Pilgrim was terrified
of the threat of lost love,
what it could do, how it would feel

Terrified of what love can do to him;
but without love, there is death,
death moving in, fine and slow,
in white wings, a mercy

He told her: Keep all my passwords, please,
and my money, my keys, when you receive
this note, don`t look back, just go.

The Savage Pilgrim lies in state tonight.
He loved the girl so much it hurt,
he told her so much it was all he could
do to stunt his words as they crawled up
through his lips, into the Void, that botched
job, That Fake.

Silently, he would ask: Marry me? Bound me
to this mortal soil? She said No.

Preposterous, sayeth she, not the marrying kind,
and so love and failure became simultaneous
epitaphs in his brain. His weakened, tormented,
chemical addled mind. Of the heart?
Who knows for sure? The Savage Pilgrim,
a sprinter, a conjurer, in leather boots,
a time traveler, a breach birth, just another
botched job as it moved through space, a misfit
full of lies and sacred music, his tomb, his life,
his death ... the long distance race ended
when he met her.

Not much choice in these matters: Not for love,
who he loved, who he plundered, where he ran for cover,
like a vampire, he, stealing hearts for fuel, even
in the end (though the Savage Pilgrim knew better),
this is all a test, really, a lesson. Life is practice, see?

So they lay there, on the stones overlooking
the Red Rock valley. He told her: It`s all right
with me if you just want to lay here and die together.

She was completely free (well, not really)
but connected to him (yeah, right buddy)
in ways they would never completely understand.
In the Valley of Death, the psychoanalyst roamed,
she bobbed and weaved through a dotted juniper grove,
stamping through pinion and prickly pear below.

That was right after he saw the face of Gaia
in meditation, of Esha Na Glese, of Changing Woman,
with a broad pudgy face, broad lips, wide forehead,
bad teeth (now that was a detail he would have never
considered ...)

There would be no sexual healing, no earth healing,
for the Savage Pilgrim, who lies in state here,
stretched out, stretched, a stretching wretch,
victim of psychoanalyzing half-truths, and worse,
dopey metaphysical mush about love and lust, truth and trust,
for he knew: The other side of every wing is higher, even,
than the spiritual thing.

Gaia, moving in mysterious ways, was just a manifestation,
and so the Savage Pilgrim moved across the earth and plowed
it asunder; haunting for the sound of her thunder, her body
moving under. For her torso to worship or whip, it was obvious.
His church was her passion, his city her lips, her toes he kissed
in mythic bliss.

But she forgets like the moon bouncing back light, like a monsoon
storm in summer, barren and cold by the fall. Weary and old, with a love
that just scolds, frowning its brow, all enclosed, refusing his heat
as the Savage Pilgrim ran from his dimming soul and found it, again,
on the empty still streets before dawn. For a time, her churned,
for maybe a full moon, maybe an eclipse, maybe two, yearning for her touch.

But ashen and true, a white lunar dust, she made a bland dream
of mountain and bones. The Savage Pilgrim, in a chilly mornin`
moondance, walked into the city square, left on a razor sharp boat,
a fine edge he borrowed from some woman, some new soon-gone tommorrow.
He lifted from here, in the Tao of Ra, dreaming of her ta tas, her
black eyeliner, her jaw, eclipsing his blood within the dark
in staccato chants, morbid, then silent, his last big romance.