Footsteps

Phantoms that walk

Footsteps sound from out of nowhere; I suddenly heard the sluicing of treading water across the pavement, quite out of tandem with my own halted stride; echoing, reverberating, engulfing me — phantoms that walk. Haunted visionaries carve impressions in the flesh while ingesting maps seasoned with the futility of denial; wraiths jest at chasing after multitudinous billowing shrouds.

Meanwhile, errant clouds drift
with no reason implied;
sunlight dapples the sidewalk
as it falls from the sky.

Komorebi smatterings descend the dark fissures of widening seams in the sidewalk, surpassing some sort of event horizon, bending the light, slipping into labyrinthian adventures in fission, with me standing there baffled and bewildered. Oh, the irony! Converging chants of all the words never spoken resounding off the concrete in unexpected auditory intimations mourning every heartbreak carried in silence.

A contradiction quilts
into the patchwork,
dissolving the threads
stretching far backward.

As I catch glimpses of erroneous outlines demarcating the misinterpreted, lost creatures of the night, muddy flash floods wash over the sanitized, thin veneers of conditioned normalcy, utterly divorced from resolution in a manifestation that cannot be ignored. Culminating in half-possessed lyrics, ripened on a twisting vine and enveloped in a raven’s wing, lies a sonnet bereft of a signature.

The compass began shattering,
directions splinter into shards
which rent and tear to pieces
the hallowed house of cards.

© Brigitte Bebey

Special thanks for inspiration from J.D Harms. I felt inspired by several creative prompts from Scrittura, including cutting up the forms, the month-long theme Corvids, and haunting energies. I had a burning desire to use the word ‘Komorebi’ in this poem. It is a Japanese word that I adore for which there is no English translation; it means sunlight filtered through the leaves of trees.

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