I only sleep when the moon’s full I need a light in the dark sky I’m all alone in this room for two I wish I’d never said goodbye I only sleep when the moon’s full I need a light in the dark sky I only cry when I’m breathing I need to know that it’s all right
moon
Astronomy without knowing we’re made of stardust
There was a sky of waning moonlight
and a half-filled brandy bottle.
There were cigarettes without filters
and smoke obscured your sultry eyes.
We wrote our names in nightlight,
waiting for the end of time.
We stayed up late together.
We considered all there is.
We took each other everywhere.
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We ate the food of our ancestors and the raw meat devolved us.
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We lived like feral animals.
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We lost our every language;
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**************************that means we lost the words for love.
Slowly, we returned ourselves.
But didn’t there used to be a waning moonlight?
Didn’t there used to be heavenly bodies?
Things You Wanted from Heaven
I only wanted eyes of gold and a smile made of diamonds.
You only wanted to not grow old and keep your soul a’shinin’.
You did not need another life to fill your broken heart.
You watched the old man in the moon for signs that you should start.
The old man’s voice was soft, though he was a good-for-nothing bastard.
You kept clinging to the past as though it’d help you heal much faster.
So soft that moonlit voice, like a rope of silk and satin.
When the old man spoke, you shook and could not say what happened.
The moon revealed, “There are many people like you in this crumbling world.
They don’t care for their future, thinking all is double toil.”
“Don’t mistake me for a man, lest I take your only life.
Don’t mistake me for a man, lest I take you for my wife!”
You said, “As long as you shall light me, I’ll forever be just fine.
Your pale caress will be enough to corral my wandering mind.”
“And even if I lose control some nights from here to when,
Regrets will never stop me from standing with you here and then.”
The energy to come back again and again
A flower seemed
to grow alone
in a field.
Upon closer inspection,
I watched a bee crawl
from underneath
a petal.
The bee whistled a tune;
something
about missing his honey
while being out
on the road.
The song had a slow,
steady melody,
undergirded
by a buzzing melancholy.
Soon, other bees
I also hadn’t noticed
joined in the whistling.
I found the music odd,
unsettling.
The chorus of bees whistling
took me back
to someplace
I thought
I might never
visit again.
I left the bees
to walk in wooded silence
for the next two hours.
While the sun dropped,
I came upon
the shape of a house
as it slowly moved forward
from a dead end
in the woods.
I knew the house was alive,
for it breathed,
and it sighed,
and it waited
to help me remember a world
that I had forgotten.
I sat down
on the front porch
in seat that was warm
and watched a broken moon
appear low
in the sky.
Did you know the moon
was once a simple ball
of amniotic fluid?
Before it became
a great, celestial body?
We were all birthed by the moon and we never even knew it;
that part of our common history
erased.
I then began
to recall
all the things
I learned
during my college years
spent on an isolated island
off the shores of Greenland.
I remembered my moon studies professor
telling us how
she had learned
on her first day at school
that the sun
was not the center
of the universe,
but that it was the moon,
our moon above.
She told us
that the moon
and the sun
had gotten divorced
long ago
over a terrible thing
that was too terrible
to say.
She told us
about the polar nights,
the forever dark
and the clinging cold,
nights which scoffed
at attempts
to separate them
by thin slivers
of noonday light.
She told us
about the colors of the moon,
what they meant,
and why we should fear
a deep-purple sky.
She told us
how the moon
is covered with dust
from the sun,
light and golden,
and how the moon
has an outer ring
like a belt of rocks
strung together
from our mistakes.
In fact, she once told us
that if we stared at the sun,
right into its hot, glowering eye,
we would see the moon within.
She told us
that the moon
is a great jewel,
a magic treasure
of the universe.
She told us
that the moon has two halves,
the side it presents to the sun,
and the other side,
which she never talked about except to say,
“It is impossible
to see it both ways.”
I think back
to how
I was taught
the hidden truths
constraining the moon.
On the porch
that night,
I stared,
wary of the broken,
still-circling moon
and felt anxious
at the approach
of the bees’ whistles
coming to radiate
right through me.
Jason Preu 