Category: earthling

shelled

creatures in wartime

After the war moved in, some went numb and never returned. Some emitted the atmosphere of carnival, others of tombs. Either way, what rattled was the shells of battle shocks, tiring over time while inside them the minds and lives of us where it rained fire and none could remove their boots, an endless waiting while covered in successive barrels of earth but not relief. We saw things and heard them, carrying on. 

a.m. notes

by river bed

Here it is again: you, falling
from another heaven at daybreak;
sob of thunder, waking, to play agin
against the dealer’s fixed chips.

You know you won’t get out of here
alive, but can’t keep yourself
from trying.

Meanwhile, outside leaves
pearl hot beads
of late-morning mist
alert and insistent––

long past the hour
when the last god slipped
from leaking basket
of a drowning heir to call
after one of the prophets
groaning another toothache
from too much gnashing of teeth
to make another now from the next
application of warm rum
to gums stayed through mornings
by sleep.

There is so much
more to do, and we with teeth
still in us, some keep on
keeping,
biding time.

hello, troubles

settling into the dark passage

How else does one go about making a soul, anyway, except by taking the aches as they come, one by one? I see you, Heartache. Lamentations, I heard you coming from miles away. Come in, chip away, then; there is plenty of me to go around. I know already that you’re going darken the whole place down. Here’s one way to find those little lights that have been hiding in the cracks, keeping company with the mice who ran off with the last of the cheese.

celestial bodies

uncertain orbit

Given enough practice, a body
will adapt to almost anything.

What follows adaptation are
impressions filtered through
tether by which body learns
to disconnect.

Notice the intensity & velocity
of spin, point being to propel
other bodies into orbit around
that central heat.

The quiet was brief
&
when done, she thought:

Here come lamentations,
returning.

point being

in the after

The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.

evening, late Nov.

in the year before it turned

Now comes the year of French cooking from a book purchased used outside the school penned by a woman who knew the old country before the war, the smell of its cows, soft hides furred and warm in the sun, how does someone get to be this woman? thinks our reader drawing toast and butter against visions of onion soup against hunger adding more salt to toast, who cannot get enough.

People on the screen after the fires and the floods announce plans to rebuild. Maybe it’s no good trying to interview those who won’t, who just stand there without words, waiting to accept. So the hopeful in the aftermath are a self-selecting group, at least onscreen.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn, in the skeletons of former homes, still smoking to grow new cells.

Hold still, they told us, meaning faith but without work––it looked half dead in mirrors. We listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday sorting into proper displays. But what do you name the waters rising high enough to occasion a jump to the next roof, hoping it holds?

Hey Siri what do you know of shelter? It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak. We reached ready for the next ledge. She might have said you can wait until dark. Siri we might have answered: I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Ghosts before us pointed next and up ahead. We had begged to see it but one wing caught in the updraft was suspended in the act of looking back. It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away singing look away and it was possible to keep wishing merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.

Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues we offered first milk to those bound close to us until the cold moon. When it came there would be blood and money enough to say we will be okay another year, until that time comes to pull it back again, sun of our sons.