Toward a Freedom (Faith's Falling, Its Failing)

Of your lackings, my laborings have not lapsed.
Though your kingdoms, nude of truth,
of images that distend, impede this heart, its yen.

The ceasing shape of belief;
the infinite feeding of tease, of all.

To piece the each severance of scripture and dream
I must cede this self...

and of your worth I am unwilling.

The spirit has known shadow and string, hope and hymn.
Enough of each to swim existence.

But as I vanish the votive mouth of nursling,
I envisage ignorance and incertitude;
all that is needs to assemble anew...

O deliquescence, remit me this revelation.


© Christopher Brandon Lancaster

Bantam Willows

Through light's kiss,
its slip and sprawl,
my morning grazes the nighing palms of summer;
the dulled hour of azure
conquering the slow curvature of our entire.

Seisms evince offer to glean among this scape's flesh,
as our urnal drag bodies the assails of mutability.
Siring nuance, ambages loosen to perpendicularity
lending ascent...

To the stalled fume whose flood structures cypress
as we behold this aspect's clench.

Of its weaving of seasons,
we are time;
celebrants of its secret.


© Christopher Brandon Lancaster

Antarabhāva X

...But what keeps our fetish fed?
The flight of lightlessness,
natally anointed,
deathlessly spread?
Remembrance as totem?
The chiefmost contours of illusion as moment?
The advent of light,
of moon-fed skies,
that enable silhouettes' furtherance?
Ill-paralleled, toward a truth, we amble.
Onward...


© Christopher Brandon Lancaster

Ruth and Rose

...Hand of hand
Whose strikings, steeled and scored,
render a sweep pledged of return, gathered of glow.

Choired tongues that pace my days,
image reality to rear retort of ignorance and echo.

Stillness gouged of the cyclic staves of age

shores light's spread turned of its lacking.
Tethered to memory and pardon,
sound, once loath to noise neath our harvest,
Psalms now the siblings' unstitch.

Calm wife, whither and wherefore shall your godship stretch?

Devoured of brisance,
the ivory hours, that illumed once the flesh of your earned curvature,
settle, keyed of breath and the perils of flight...

As I, foundress, of helms, sleepless, ceaseless
Of what feeds each
past puissance of sway to gentle descent,
Furnish doubt and preclusion of all pence

To mount life of vested hymnary
To freely relearn the episodes, the gestures
of strangers, their sleights, their sleeves...

Arrangement sheds the feigning of shape
As I fall my thoughts to you and
upon their artifice
the visible sings if to only remember.

Ash of pride and hymen
I behold, kneeling the unearthed keep of praise:

Graced palms, absent of feeling
graze the diphthong of our union.

Having nourished the every limit and rise,
Need of needs,
Ever unseen,
I carry your return

Tholing asides as my chilled hands rescind their reign.


© Christopher Brandon Lancaster