An Old Incantation

© 2011 David Jasmin-Green

My muttered mantra revives a dream long absent,
an atavistic resurgence that by all rights
should have died in the gathered dust of all these years.
But the astonishing, slightly terrifying something breathes -
it is born of a black mantra maybe, I don't know.
Is it so wrong to call from the abyss
something that God deemed never to be?
I catch a whispered promise that failed to arrive
in the heat of the original moment
of our original sin, a tangled impossibility,
a tyrannical love rage rampant and seething,
trapped amongst layers of darkness and light.
Perhaps it is never too late for revelation,
it's never too late – and you know, love,
that nothing I could wish for could mean more to me than you.

My muttered mantra ignites a flame long extinguished,
too dark a mantra for the present moment, maybe,
I don't know. Perhaps I've been gnawing on seeds
that should have dehydrated and died way back when.
The past is passed, I know that, my love,
but I guess thoughts and flowers and old love songs
can never really die.

I smell the incense of fine, fiery carnal demons
unsummoned and unperceived,
(but there's no smoke without fire, or so they say),
so perhaps a tiny ember of our love-lust survives.
I expect no inferno, Twisty,
just a cosy little bonfire to celebrate our mutual vanity.
Maybe, just maybe one of the seeds I saved
in some cobwebbed antechamber of my heart
bears a viable embryo
of tomorrow, of next week or next year
that I can't quite make out through the haze of now.

My muttered mantra nibbles at the back of my mind,
and it will not let me be.
It may well be too solid a dream,
too fleshy and blissful, true, alive and free.
Twisty, darling sweet, I honestly don't know.