she is difficult
to read

clearly
not the same

or

all illusion meaning
you scribble

punctuation
in the margins

briefly:

on between bales huddled
their gaze the smoke
shifting follows

i burn
occasionally with tears

i wake
wiping away sleep’s ashes
no longer heroic
centered

different same
hesitant to say
man so i say ship

puzzle of which
pieces remain

close
underbrush
thrashes
throes

close
approaching
crimson
alabaster

close
submerged
incisored
taloned

(remove not your hand from its throat)

It’s not enough to repeat what you’ve heard about it
You must inhabit it

Its confusion and cacophony
Touch it and feel it resist you

You must not resist it

Your father & his father have a shelf
Heavy with preserves

You must be tempted by the jars they tell you
Their contents are bitter

Those groaning brackets beg to differ
In collapse: What then?

No you must drink deeply all
A moribund forest begs flame

You must not resist it

The seed of it is inside
It must be unwrapped

The agony you did not choose
The trauma your birthright

It is not enough to inhabit the bones
You are flesh

Flesh that shall again be remade
In the likeness not of flesh but of light

You must not resist it

Deep into the thicket you go
A story told in scars

Badges:
O how they hate me

Deeper still
Sewing as you go

Your warren a halo
Your passion

Till at journey’s end you finally confront
Its maker

A face suspiciously
Your own

It’s only been a century and here we are:
We forget so quickly.

You in particular choose to read tea leaves.
It’s a familiar sort of blindness.

We don’t have to agree. But
Regardless the earth still is round.

This is the hidden knowledge:
There’s no hidden knowledge.

Or, at least, there’s not so much
As you imagine.

They can’t help themselves.
Their effluence flows into their cisterns
Until to thirst is to drown
Inside out.

What trickles down is also
Tainted. Sweat. Faeces.
Such breathtaking gifts upon which
To subsist.

They can’t help themselves.
So they must be helped. Might our many hands
Assist them? Up,
Up the steps.

Lay down and let the scalpel do its work.
Perhaps they will be healed. Perhaps
As ripe fruit they will
Burst open

And the crowd of children below
Will inherit the seeds.

the red wire or the green
it’s critical you try to find
a method to tell, sighted unseen
raised colourblind

it might feel like any cord
is every cord (spoiler: it’s not)
when untangling less-sword
this frightful knot

whose sailsmen blowing smoke
tell us it’s supposed to remain
this way; not a joke
but a work of frame

a washline on while to hang, eventually
with accumulating junk
an ever-bending knee
sunk

into divots well-maintained
by copper-wound scarecrows who
(disinterested in pain)
are not concerned for the you

so you search for wirecutters
and attempt to discern
(crowd watches, frowns, mutters,
in the good old that’d burn)

a way forward, sane, unnumb,
without setting that dynamo
spinning in your cranium
a way go to

without going anywhere, not really
and to hell with those who disagree

the stories we tell ourselves are untrue–
as ourselves are untrue–
they come seeking after themselves
always to find

your hero and mine remaining at odds
with eachother and with the always-
just-beyond-reach
story’s story

which is known in the distance’s distance
shrouded monoliths who never
resolve

who might as well be tea leavings
read amongst scattered awful
some deserved future

where the stories we tell ourselves are true
and we are true and it was worth it
and we and it are more than whatever
we and it might be

I have three eyes

Two for the hues that are
One for an unnamed suffusant elsewhere

Two of concrete everyday
One indolent undercovers

Sees sooth on occasion whose
Untangled chords remain

Unoft unblinking wide
Into the neardistant

The yestermorrow’s frayed vibrato
Could be anywhere, anything

Echoes of not is nor never was
The essential maybe

I have three eyes

Two for the hewed at hand
One for unamended unquarried

For which when sleep arrives
Arrives for ever