Breath Before

The hair of the lightning, and the branches at its edges
Form to me some softly spoken soliloquy
To which there is no one who can resist the sound,
Unbound as it takes off into the air,

The spark of a heartbeat.

It falls into the path of the blood as it unfurls
Breathing into each fingertip, foot, and feeling
Curling into a fist that breaks into toxic cheekbone,
Knuckles splaying as they learn the difference
Between karma, revenge, and poetic justice.

The hair of the lightning, and the branches at its edges
Endow to me a divine dispute, divine damnation, divine DNA

Divining from the endless black a single answer:

The shedding of chains, the freedom to change,

Seeking hostility and intercepting it with combustibility.

It transmutes its abusers into mutable gold
Anger to drive and pain into poetry, the Muses into the Fates

It singes as it baits their lavish lies into full bloom, splayed like museum butterflies.
It can see you shiver behind your testimony in the witness box

Your eyes are pinhole cameras.

The pyre alight, now burns
Warms a body too frigid for fighting as it grieves

Over an oppressor left too long alone,
And as the bystanders stand by, pointing broken fingers,
The lightning, and all its rigidity, falls asleep.