BEHIND IT

In my hands, I want to feel
the crusted black loam
of generations: the hands
that slit the cattle’s throat,
strangled the chickens,
stroked the lamb’s ear,
grew calloused and sturdy
and bent. My mother,
watching the tractor
turn over the soil
on her ancestral farm-land,
saw the spinning wheel
of seagulls rising behind it,
to swoop and peck at any
chance green offal left exposed.
“I have to believe,” she said
“that a world this well planned
has to have some kind of force
at work behind it.”
I want to feel that in my hands;
a certainty to hold on to.

SWEEPING THE NATION…

Like your id on all fours,
like a combustion engine with a mouth,
like an excitable inmate on broom duty.
Allow me the honors, you heard it here first:
The dance goes to the volcano’s edge.
Bite your tongue, you might draw some blood.
The tide has turned on a dime, and you
have a one-time free trial offer to track it.
DNA sampling is just one of many hidden costs.
Join now. Void where prohibited, and we’re
pretty much nihilists, so, y’know, do the math…

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KING MOJO

I am taking simple joy
and grinding it down
to a fine glass; said filaments
to be inhaled by orphans in any
number of undisclosed nations,
as per contract, etc., etc.
I am part of a massive
clean-up initiative that forgot
to inform its’ center.
I’m dusting for prints, forgive
the forensic evidence.
I feel like I’m meeting you
for the first time. When I say
you, I mean me. If guilt
were as old as dust, my hand
would be everywhere…

MISER’S LAMENT

Your silence was golden,
but below market value.
I seized upon it, anyway,
with a miser’s gnarled heart,
alight in the knowledge that
what I possessed left everyone
else with a little bit less.

Did you just say something?
Damn. That depreciates the sum
total; every word eating away
at my unspoken stockpile.
I beg of you, keep your thoughts
to yourself. If less is more, think
how much more even less would be…

THE FALLEN SNOW KINGS…

…fall at my door, the sun’s gold forehead
shows in the slow, gristled thaw, the mining
of grit from this boundless blank arithmetic.
Faces fall at my door, swollen with echoes.
I choose not to step outside, to let winter’s cull
take me.

OVERTHRONE

From sorrow’s throne, a smile
was made, this rictus split open
like fruit prone before the blade,
scattering the seeds’ teeth,
signaling the easiest breach,
the damp, blank earth still unbroken.
We will say what we have to say,
we will curse this ground to its’ marrow.
We will claim these ruins fallen and gone,
but never that we are its’ bastard young.