you were behind a screen, always.
and I
wrestled with demons, wondering --
what is this secret she hides?
who is
this person that she talks to
in
the
hidden places, veiled
within the lakes of
your true desire
the texture of the teeming earth is all the proof we need of lies; each second thought, a second birth, the sun, a way to cauterize the wounds that we inflict amid the casus belli of the day: the wager, always underbid, the silence, all we have to say.
the lost voice looked for in the white whistled chimes a pan of wan dread and blocked doors and sounds left to cry
swirling unspecified in the middle of a chaos poured from pitchers of deep rain cannons firing across the still december mourning for a lost adulthood framed by a little used childhood endeavor just brings sorrow what if i can't do it what if i'm not enough what if i what if what
all the hammer blows.
tractile and malleable —
incessantly down.
bent, shaped and worn complanate
longing for rest. — relentless —
the world’s a store, and
we walk by products that are
arranged to catch our eyes;
our attention often fixed upon
objects not present, the
subjects of our current fixations –
and yet, if economics allow, we often
buy products that we know we may not
need or even want, merely from a sort of
habit of politeness; a feeling that
so much trouble was gone to for us, we
really should show some support –
bringing home these pointless objects, we
find ourselves leaving by-products, traces
of these and other half-optimal choices that
make up most of our days; the things we do, because
we must do something, and so we choose from among
the options available to us
if, of course, by “products” we are thinking of
things like relationship and career choices, this
only becomes more true – and more the
pity, since we frequently either don’t go to
enough stores to provide sufficient choice or
go to stores long after the right choice has been
purchased by someone else
the gods demanded sacrifice,
and so we offered
tolerance
it’s not like anyone
was using it
that much
for what you can’t destroy,
you still can
lock away
we do that now, in every manner
those words can
be stretched
and how we torture words, to make it
seem as though we mean the
things we say;
but we do not. at least we do not live
the values we espouse, nor do
we really want to
and spiders – there are spiders in the halls,
the webs are everywhere —
we call our hate self-love,
and turn our self-love into
candy-coated knives
with power comes
nobody’s peter parker;
the price is right, but we
have got no barker
the song of houston, but
how will i know?
we stowaway what we should never
stow
the bars slam shut, because we
close them down;
don’t know your name, you’re just
some damned pronoun
the skittish horse may try
to flee the pen;
but hunted down they are,
always
again
when semiotics tells us to,
we stop and genuflect:
the dog-whistles that really
guide our lives —
the empty hallways do not mean
that all the ghosts have left;
the blood is in the pipes,
not in the water
and the pipes
go everywhere
a white powder day, the buzzards swarming in
circles above an inadequate dissonance
finding winter across bleak margin, and
a cross above frightened bushes huddled for warmth
it is a winter’s choice that must be made in every season:
to carry on, or be
carrion
