close
underbrush
thrashes
throes
close
approaching
crimson
alabaster
close
submerged
incisored
taloned
(remove not your hand from its throat)
The Last Battle
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
Thicker
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
Hidden
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.
The Seeds
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.
wirecutters
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
stories (yrs & mine)
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
unoft
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
always sow
difficult reading
these tea leaves who
coy whispers
i might if pressed
its damnation conceptual yet participatory
who knew couldn’t have known
wicked seams always
sow
why are there so many telescopes
it figures
eyes outrailing
& all’s horizon
how could it be otherwise
to return then
is to find now
similarish
how could you do otherwise
to turn away from wheels within
& find wheels without
spokes
how could you speak otherwise