When we were crazy-young
we listened, eyes shut, to the pound and run
of the very thought of magic
as if to warm a dormant bud,
open some hidden valve
deep in the blood’s dark valleys.

Behind our eyes, colours of crushed black carbon,
a velvet-plush scarlet, burnt sienna,
the thin sustained ring of some mind-wire
opening, opening its note
at the top of the spine, the force of want
that could stiffen the joints, swell the ribs,
full body straining with the hunger
to be wonder’s chosen emissary.

Surely if the urge was strong enough
it would run the nerves’ flared webs,
spill bioluminescence that we could tap
like blazing tapers to animate wood, paper,
wool, mud, grain, paint, flower,
the spiky shadows that furniture threw,
finger-print smudge on boredom’s walls,
even the small chainsaw of a fly’s hectoring whine.

How we willed our touch
to tornado and twister that torpid humdrum
into some hybrid awe that would sway and soar,
skin scented like crushed sage, breath like sipped nasturtium;
lower its head to listen, as if we were each a lacquered music box
where our raw thoughts plinked and bumbled their young
                                                                                               syllabary;

yet even so — beast-haunch hunkered,
gaze flood-swollen —
it would still turn to each of us,
gaze savage but godly
with a revolutionary love.