Cathedral of Unbuttoned Animals

More about Cathedral of Unbuttoned Animals

Ink sneezes into a cathedral of borrowed elbows,
while the fish writes a treaty with the wall.
The wall agrees, mostly because it has no wrists.
Above, a cathedral repeats its ceiling like a nervous apology,
arches learning to stutter in Gregorian spirals.

Faces bloom where faces shouldn’t,
beards pour from eyes,
eyelids dream of hooves,
and the hooves compose philosophy in hoof-language:
“CLACK CLACK CLACK” (translated: We would like a different century.)

A rider made of rumor points an invisible spear
at a bird the size of a political confession.
Crow-feathers rearrange into proclamations,
but the proclamations only want soup.
Soup wants a throne.
The throne wants to be a pillow.
No one gets what they want
except perhaps the whale pretending to be furniture.

Books breathe in the corners,
pages cough dust that smells like prayers left in pockets.
Someone’s saint sits calmly with too many faces
and not enough afternoons.
The saint says, “My body is an annexed parliament of heads,”
and the heads nod, because nodding is the most democratic motion.

A deer rehearses its antlers like a choir of branches,
singing hymns for weather that hasn’t happened yet.
A mer-creature wriggles into the language of water,
splitting sentences into fins,
turning punctuation into scales.

Everything is dignified,
even the nonsense.
Especially the nonsense.
Buildings climb up themselves,
rooms forget their doors,
history melts down into a soup of etchings,
alphabet bones clicking quietly like insects in velvet gloves.

Someone scrawled a message in the sky:
letters leaning, trembling,
half promise, half shrug.
It might say “my lip,”
it might say “my life,”
it might be a receipt for clouds.
The hand that wrote it floats away, relieved.

And we, we are the background texture,
we are the polite wallpaper of catastrophe,
we are the quiet citizens of impossible architecture,
sitting politely while the animals rearrange the laws of gravity,
while kings dethrone themselves into decorative silhouettes,
while the world patiently practices other versions of itself.

Silence steps forward wearing an opera costume.
Noise bows.
Ink applauds.
Reality trips on its hemline,
laughs,
and keeps going.