Terry O'Leary - Captive Bird - 12 Bars 12 Dreams lyrics

12 BARS Twelve rusty bars, one frozen lock - Confined, sublime, an ancient Roc, Enclosed inside a barren cage - Her catacomb in sundown sage. Of former days there is no trace Except displays of fallen grace - Twelve dreams, abiding in her place, Are free and dwell in yawning space: 12 DREAMS Of wings unfurled, and seething eyes That dredge the depths of dawning skies Unclamping clouds that hang below, Once ice, dissolved in morning's glow; Of clutching winds that carry free Beyond a leaden anguished sea Dispersing dust of stifled stars Midst chunks of chain in slave bazaars; Of swooping to a silent shore, To perch beyond the ocean's roar Amazed to feel the sobbing breeze Message the leaves of rooted trees; Of stalking trails of twilight tramps, Within the fog of lighthouse lamps That blink forlorn through caldron nights, In search of shades of errant Kites; Of darkling vast deserted lands, The windswept stones, the shadowed sands, Where ghosts of Moorish maidens lost Conceal their groans in mourning frost; Of blotting out the bloated moon While feathers beat a banshee tune And glimmers dance and prance aglow Upon a pearly pale plateau; Of tasting cool torrential rains, Beyond the realm of binding chains, And sipping freedom they exude In quite drops of solitude; Of whisking off a galley crew Aboard a ship in midnight dew, Beneath the pierce of seagull's screams That mock the strands of scarlet streams; Of sating once an aching craw With tearing beak, with ripping claw And echoed by an eldritch screech While feasting on abandoned beach; Of restive thoughts and weary wings That drift on haze and smoky rings Obscured within the opal shroud Of her resemblance in the crowd; Of croaking caws in broken rhyme Of winter woe, of summer clime, Of building nests of sundown sage Beyond outside a barren cage.