Prayer

 Unpaint me, benevolent spirits, 

from this corner I have found myself in. 

Ought I to be one of your humble scribes, spirits, 

so that his inky image lingers like 

his tobacco smoke in my clothes? 

Ought I to put my heart on ice 

in a bucket, slipping chunks against the metal,

 glass cutting into the viscous silence? 

Ought he, noble spirits, to leave behind

the former halcyon of bronze-gilded gold, of

cold yet open hands, of imitations of the ideal,

when all I may offer him is acute liveliness? 

Guide me, wraiths of the spectrum, in the

ebb and flow of his breath against mine.