A character in the air, Falstaff or Juan Otero, rapping at the window. Their breath curdles within the inferno of my throat. Paralyzed by ogling cherubim under glass, leering at the tottering oaf I have become, the addition of a millennium. This landscape is a sieve over a beaker of mixed gases leaving its silty essence upon the eyelashes and edges of the nostril. Caked lips that break blocks as you strain for flutters of mien. Something natural. A spongy bank along the stream that feels of ancestry, goosed with rock. Silver magic, and I can hear the call of the wild. Affixed to this border, beaten by hell, transfixed of heaven. Audience and actors deluge bare skin, swollen glands, a fall. Boiling hands touch the onyx-void, I can sip a time before complexity. Wood nymph fractured flesh, I grow the splinters that grow into branches. I am become eternal. Immovable object spinning along a galaxy mosaic; the past is blood, the now is now, and to what is expected, there is only air. All players sown to silence, no humor written in iambic pent ameter or lovable men who cannot love. They are gone. They were. I am, in this, a miracle. String theory coruscates. Raised beyond the fairy’s tail, tilted from blade to branch, exhuming spring and life to blush and cast. Aerate an aria that sneaks beneath the cobbled stone and empty man. Outside now, among the swaying back and forth, ignoring the obvious as never was, and outside. There is only air.