Along the moth-strewn road
and near the edges of the highway ravine
travels an undisclosed sentiment
dressed in military cloth
and resembling a figure
hobbling along landmarks
of sculpted foliage concealing shopping cart skeletons.
Its banner is the color red,
the scarlet of dissenting lovers,
the color of an unconstrained passion
tied in lurid sash as an armband
to a nation governed by roaming transience.
Within its violet eyes lay the secrets to animal happiness
and pressed in its lips are the codified sounds of nature's articulation
mingled with incantations older than the Ancient Pyramids.
Hair streaked with burs and cheeks marked with soot,
the figure mumbles along in a pantomime of humanity,
yet concealing something greater in the way that the earth
covers the roots of the sycamore, solidly but with hints
of labyrinthine curls denoting a foundational strength.
In its head, asterisms burgeon pinpricks of negative space
against a parchment drenched in the universe's India ink
that speak of thought and memory in the chaotic glories
of anarchic order; the gravity of sentiment and the photons
of epiphanies spread out amid a territory so vast that it
could only be called the mind.
Motorists speed by in apathy, unconscious of unknown architectures
that refuse to travel in straight paths. It is hard to know rapturous mysteries
while listening to radio advertisements, and difficult to invoke the nameless
while ensconced in the comfort of a garish shell animated by repetitive mechanics.
Our figure is driven by flow and flux, making a pulse out of decay
and a heartbeat rhythm from the constant unnoticed destruction of time.
Billowing like a storm, its body stalks moonlight in slow ellipses,
pausing only to listen for deer and wolves.
Its name is carried only beneath the breaths of those driven from their homes,
amid the motions of those who know the undercurrent of the rivers,
and amidst the scuffled ranks of deserting soldiers destroying their rifles
and walking as outcasts into open fields where the flame of the poppy
means more to the eye than the bauble allurements of a halogen-lit town.
Its name, for your sake, must go undisclosed, hidden in a pocket in which
common thought does not reach and concealed within pages of an unwritten book
that will not exist until the world ceases to believe that what is named is always known.
