Poem: Eternal Returns To Oz by Nate Maxson

Eternal Returns To Oz

Words by Nate Maxson
Image by Gretchen Gales
@GGalesQuailBell
QuailBellMagazine.com

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​Once I stuttered over wheat fields gone to junk and dust, trying to explain myself
And climbed back into my bed before the peacocks started crowing
So that no one would know I was gone
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And you were there and YOU were there and YOU were there…
We hate that ending so much, The Emerald City just a dream: back to black and white
 
Once I swallowed the fairy tale: like a pill/ like a prayer/ like a tornado
I was a gibbering dodgefire pattern of a scarecrow swaying towards an event horizon like a drunk with a world to prove
Marked by black spots where they’ll hang the stars when they’re ready to come out again
 
Once I had swallowed the fairy tale
Like a ship in a bottle
Youth in the days of forgetting
I asked,
What return is this?
When I was wise but not the wisest
I had two glass eyes, dark green like I was underwater
 
At the end of the world there is a girl about to wake up
Give me a name and an address and I can make it never happen
 
The intrusion of curdled nostalgia
Invokes voices with whom we’d rather not treat
 
When I was brave but not the bravest
I dreamed I was a singing clockwork intelligence
Fleshed out of ice and sundial smooth
 
All I knew was the twilight-language
Scrunching my body against the light
With which I tricked the birds,
The ravens, who cover flecks of silver in their shadowing folds
I sang them a procrastination at best, a delay
Into providing me shade
 
I’m not doing this for justice or kindness or climate change
I had to point my tightly leashed hunting-song somewhere
I didn’t need
But I knew
 
Those you leave behind:
Ghosts go to the city
Aim me from your mouth
And I’ll go to the sky