Poem: Wool-gathered Child (Patreon)

Wool-gathered child, who walks

as if through cloud-cloaked air,

and dances thoughtlessly

in dreams that shroud the light:

you forget your flesh,

and then in slow naivete

you wonder how 

the world around you runs.

The rules of Earth are mysteries

to you, unknowable, a matter of faith

and not subject to experiment.

Oh, I know your secret,

air-born aesthete, blind outside

your pale cocoon: so

deep do you spin your dreams

they occlude your sight, and layered

'round you deepening they

snow you in until they block out

the sunlit real and you --

you do not know how to see.

I look at you and in your eyes

I see a fragile fantasy.

How strange that you look at me

and the world we live in

and think the same.

But if you woke tomorrow and

could strip the cloudy veils

from your sight,

would you still be you? Or

would you fly apart and return

to the stuff of nonsense

that alone made order of an Earthly, fleshy life?

Wool-gathered child,

spirit built of clouds:

too much wool-gathering

made you, but also set you at 

a star-shelled remove.

You are of this world, 

but you do not move through it.

When you at last return to the matter

from which you sprung,

only God will know how much of you

was ever really here.