Key To The Moon

Key To The Moon
By Jon Achilles Landon

Tumbling slowly down, a hawk’s feather fell 10

Out of the Sea of Clouds 10

10

And a pocket watch dangling down,

No longer able to keep time but only to sleep

And there inserted into the moon

Was a key that ignited the subconscious universe

Sly cat tracks across a marsh plowed

Lay in comic ambush

For a hapless bird that might drink there.

And tangled around everything

Was a spool of red blood thread

That spilled to the floor of my mother's sewing room

Where she sat knitting me for months and months inside her womb

A feather of cloud shred in the winds,

The cloud that broke the horse’s back.

An owl took flight and the night collapsed.

What had been indigo was now ultra-violet

And a mountain loomed in the distance, ever-silent,

While the world arose in unconscious rebellion.

And the watch ticked

And from what I heard it told Time

What seemed so transparently a lie.

But Time believed the tale, and from thereon recounted it

Again and again. Yea, Time reported it

From atop the tallest tower.

But it was all simple-minded madness,

And what was once a nursery rhyme was now history,

But that was just the massive, mechanical sound of

The turning of this antique key inside the lock

That ticked over the engine of the moon,

That mad woman at night

Raving in the sky from her attic

Who threw open all the doors in the heavens

And ran off nakedly into the night.