Night Wind

The wind is blowing hard again, wiping darkness against the window, blowing the night across the sky

Wind, moaning in the wires, rustling in the branches, wind with a thousand tongues. Of what does it speak? What does it know? What does it seek to tell?

Is it looking for me? Are you looking for me, wind? Here, here I am, in my little shell-prison,

Wrapped in walls of skin. Here. In this room, at whose window you batter, you with the wings of the starlight, the cold of the gulfs between the stars. What will you do if I let you in?

Is it midnight yet? Is it midnight already? I don’t want to look at the clock. I don’t want to know the time. Time passes, then was now, and now will be then again.

The screensaver drags its slow coloured ribbons across the computer screen, yellow as the sun, green as the spring, orange as the clouds at sunset, red as blood.

The inside of my wrists, channelled with veins like a tree’s branching roots, but the veins run blue; I would have to rip them open to see the red flow, red like the setting sun, red like the moon at the moment before dawn, pregnant and full on the horizon –

These are my wrists, these are my hands, these are my feet. Have I ever seen my feet before? These strange organs where my body ends, on the carpet below? Bones and muscles and tendons, a marvel of perfect architecture they say, and part of me, but have I ever seen them before? What do I know of them? What is that scar there, a half moon of white on my toe? Where did it come from?

What do I know of my feet? What do I know of myself?

Have I ever seen myself before? This skin-wrapped bundle, a pane of glass away from the hungry wind? What am I, what have I been? What will I be if I let the blood flow red out of the blue-walled prison of their veins?

What if I burn on the wind, like a piece of paper, a paper on which there might be something good written, or something bad, or maybe nothing at all? When the paper burns, what meaning do the words have? The wind blows the ash to powder, and scatters it everywhere

And not even an epic poem on the paper will make a bit of difference when it’s afire, it will burn to the same ash as a child’s scribble will. Will you blow me away, wind? Will you, if I give myself to you?

Scattered across the sands of distant deserts, in the branches of a forest, to be washed down with the rain, up in blue mountains I would fly, and down across the waves of the stormy sea.

What would it feel like to ride the wind, up and away, like smoke from burning paper, leaving the ash behind? Riding it up into the gulfs between the galaxies, plunging into the mists of time? Would I be blown into the vasty darkness, up into the endless deep?

What stories do you know, wind? What tales can you tell me, here in this prison of skin, inside this outer prison of glass and plaster and stone? What caverns of the night have you known, what Arctic wastes? You tap at the window, wind. How many windows have you tapped at tonight, and at how many more will you?

Tell me, wind, where you have been, where you are going. Tell me what stories you have, and where you've been. All I have is your voice, wind. Lift me up with you, blow me between the stars, tell me your stories in the voices of the desert, and the grasslands, the icy mountain peak, the sullen sea.

Take me away, and set me free.

I will open the window now. I will open the window and let you in.

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