The prayer Cicada

The prayer Cicada

I.

their sound the roaring tumble of an airplane,
yelping a nascent cry of living...

soon the motor drone will cease cicada,
your moss-green intonation,
burrowed into the syntax of the Buddhist's haiku
and the southerner's humid laboring atop
sun baked bricks,
your harmonics that thumbed their way
into the neighborhood's ears,
like wave dolloped shores whooshing a
stream of consciousness, subtle
as the intake of breath or even less perceptible,
like a thought, will be filled by crickets and car alarms
and gloomy maniac screams, imperfect silence is the night
when you depart cicada.

autumn's care-worn smile kills the leaves, in a month,
but you wont live to see tomorrow. the sky goes black to grey, lethal like gunmetal,
and lightning crisps the trees, your homes! but that is the future,
in the storm,
where I will haunt your brothers,
asking,what can you teach me?

cicada you are alive so brief,
how can you be said to have lived at all.
yet you rumble, thrilling in that insect sense
of purpose, hard carapace locked machine viciously,
round the legs and shivering diode, emitting your chirps:
i live i live i live

II.

at night the city crawls,
light persists through the empty,
carving out a human face for unseen eyes,
and in the grimy circuit of the sewers
crocodiles press reptilian skin against metal grates
dreaming of a former rancor.

the cicadas are silent in the dark,
yet I feel them skittering through my begging blood
until my mind spools out as one long
electric thread, humming and singeing
the candle sticks and books,
and all my possessions unite into
a singular flash,
power surging unchecked, with the raging of its tide masking
the bleating in the sky, a single thought
from the vaulted contours of my skull
to diminish my clarity in deeper purpose
and recoil my neurons into their tightest knot,
I cannot exist as one single harmony, extending my existence
into the brood around me, bound to this urging present:

what can I teach them?

III.

I have no voice to emit eternal,
I cannot be your prayer cicada.

in so little life
the cicada sings ecstatically
until its sound is the air and the trees,
inching along the walls of gridded city blocks,
in the coils of mattresses,
digging into dreams in pristine, green eruptions.

when I open my mouth and attempt to translate
the hard fought epiphanies, realizations, thoughts,
the truths I've had to pry from this long life
with my mammal mind
into melody,
I produce such quiet whispers
they can barely be called sound at all
compared to the drumming of the brood
against thorax in heaving gasps,
no, my song
is the breath against my teeth.