Aurora Australis (the Southern Lights) - JLG Clift

Aurora Australis falls from a divine and unearthly chalice made of materials so precious that there is no word in our language to gauge its splendour there never will be either because how can our slumbering fumbling syllables of sound encapsulate how profound what we're seeing is? She now soars across our unworthy skies past my unworthy eyes stringing bright streamers of red and green and blue to be seen and admired by the thinkers and the dreamers amid the screaming malice of the modest the mundane and the insane that rule the roost of life from booster chairs wearing bibs below bespoken blazers and throwing bottles motherless children one and all turning out identically cruel; her strands have made me a star gazer today I looked up mythology and space weather and found out so many things I never knew before I memorised facts that would usually bore me to my core but that was me before I saw her lying in the dullness of the night it was like seeing a miracle taking flight I didn’t feel like I deserved to have her in my sight after all I had not been looking for her I had not been waiting for her call I’d been staring at the ground listening to the sounds of the world my mind boxed in behind red brick walls miles thick where I had so often dwelled but above the chaos of the ice turning to sludge while on a cruise to nowhere which I excepted begrudgingly because a friend at Thomas Cooke had offered it to me I bitched and I moaned and I groaned as I boarded the plane that took me to the train that took me to the boat I wanted to get stoned I wanted to be alone and on the deck alone I was when I saw her beauty swelling I felt like yelling about her glory to all that were near enough to hear and after a few drinks I did I truly tried to lift the lid on what we were seeing and how harrowingly free beings like me start to feel when kneeling below her colourful cords.

How small do I look to her? I wonder whether or not it even occurs to her that I stare it’s hardly rare for men to look when her astral flares begin to tear up the lackluster sky that has always made me too tired to try anything but she excites me and entices me to be something before she makes me sigh with a mix of awe and wonder she’s soft as snow powerful as thunder she’s thrown my beliefs asunder I don’t fall for things too often my heart has never softened for anything really merely for family and occasionally friends I never thought one entity would bend my mind this far from myself and my reasoning but she has and I can almost hear her singing in the silence of the sky drifting by I know she’s small to her someone the sun but he’s got none of her attraction nor her finesse he’s boring and annoying always prying me from my snore strung fantasies seizing my time teasing me his baking heat in a lifeless blue sky always dry always hot failing to care about his subjects beating our necks with his rays until they’re raised and red and practically bloody all the way to the top of our heads; if I had my way Man would protest his rise indefinitely so that we could forever be basking in my impossibly unchangeable and unattainable loves caresses that catch our eyes from above her curls unfurling limitlessly lingering endlessly sending my heart and my speech into stutters and my passionate roars into boyish mutters I’m in awe forever my jaw tethered to the floor my mind left to stir in the unrealities of what will probably never be but that doesn’t stop me dreaming because she’s still gleaming somewhere out there and although she doesn’t care for me as I for her I don’t think I still stare at her never blinking so that I don’t stop drinking her sultry solar display in; true the unattainable aspect of this all does fill me with an unusually painful brand of dismay that will surely remain no matter where I stay or how many girls I lay in a million lifetimes she’ll always be there flowing behind my rhymes like Maude for Yeats only minus the bitter hate that that old failure felt the radiant nature of her florescent curves swerving so smoothly through the atmosphere has melted my mind into tears leaking through my longing eyes but I don’t cry half as much  as I would if I were unable to see her swirling in the dark night of the sky and igniting it with her endless glow that spreads across her baying body head to toe flowing going everywhere she can so that all men may be inspired as much as she has inspired me wiring her priceless wares throughout the sky.

It is for selfish reasons that I cry because I want to be the only man that sees her occurring her body curling beside mine in the night as I lie on my mountain top tears stripping sleep back from my bewildered eyes; it saddens me that she'll never try to stay with me but what saddens me more is that at sunrise I'll have to see her die again and that is surely a sight that humbles all sane men.