I WANT MY WALL

I have ever loved castles
the pinioning of arrow-slit eyes
the cloud catching towers
where a fall might take a childhood
I want my walls, give me
my walls. 
Then, that wide, widest of yawns
you enter through O -
The word Portcullis gives me
an almost sexual pleasure,
                like a lover slowly describing
                what they’re wearing
                which is very little.
And Oubliette, even more so, odd
        what
we keep in our basements,
in the dark of our lockered rooms,
rotting, festering, utterly majestic
just to have something down there.
Way past bedtime,
'Steven Biesty’s Cross-Section Castles'
Investigated beneath a tented bedsheet, shivering
in torchlight, eyes climbing the ramparts, 
was it a simpler time then?
The high walls, walls
against walls, walls that
amount to something:
stronghold, fortress, keep.
I would have no reason to leave
my citadel.
In the middle-ages, the need for security
grew insatiable, fear: bashing in the brain
with a hammer, a stone.
Perhaps you did not like them
            or you liked their lover
            or they liked yours
anyway, something was wanted by someone
so you needed a defence, so you’d build
them up, real pretty like
stone upon stone, perhaps
men would help raise them, men given purpose,
stone given purpose. What a powerful machine
I want my walls
give me, my walls. The light goes out. Unexpected.
A cloud over the stone of moon.
From a lichen licked rampart
an owl keels into the moat
it is hunting, or mating
or just purely spooked
and night has come.
My eyes close,
the drawbridge is raised.
All the world’s castles
fall away like a bedsheet