Cruel Sestina
With appreciation and apologies to Taylor Swift
and her wonderful song, Cruel Summer.
“No rules in breakable heaven.” Looking in your eyes,
no fools could break even. Feeling this high
there’s no falling. I’m floating light out the window,
no angel calling and time lingering slow.
No candles, no street lamps, sighing into the night.
No handles, no guard rails, resigned to the dice.
The hourglass frozen, stuck sand ice,
refracting the icicles into my eyes.
Maybe some summer we can reignite
the airborne embers once bonfire high.
If you don’t see me you’ve set your eyes low,
I’m the spark floating out the window.
I’ve paid the blizzard, what does the wind owe?
Skate on the surface, slip-and-slide ice,
even the glaciers can see we’re too slow,
just waiting and watching our love melt in sighs.
The heat from my mind in this fever-dream high
during the chill of this dark, this insomniac night.
Gravity’s lost and this space stays finite
’round the hovering door and the floating window
that sometime fall low and sometime rise high
like the spots in my eyes or the dots on the dice
that roll over the table and face up realize
that the falling is fast but the waiting is slow.
Shot by that arrow, aim high but miss low,
breaking a vase in the bouquet of night,
marking a flower right between the eyes
while the petals, aroma float out the window,
and the rose thorns and arrow heads chopped into dice
are swept under the carpet we flew magic high.
Angels are watching and advocate shy
while devils pretend to take everything slow
and keep in their pockets the gambling dice
till everything fades in the shadow of night
and they serenade yearning outside your window
until fever compels that you look in their eyes.
“Fever dream high in the quiet of the night,”
“Killing me slow out the window.”
“Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes.”
John K. Kruschke has 25 quatrains published as chapter epigraphs, and other poems published in The Tipton Poetry Journal and accepted at The Ryder Magazine. He also published numerous articles in scientific journals on topics ranging across moral psychology, learning theory, and Bayesian statistics. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.