Our sands
With bone worn backs we huddle
in the shadow of empire, nursing
unborn stars, to beg the question:
how many dawns remain? Against
vain attempts to tame the hungers
of that constant, mechanical mouth,
its gaping hole the void in the centers
where we once met beneath another
sun, in another time, before time was
eaten too, to be excreted in legions
of micro units, meted out in
increments
of perceived
worth.
In the belly of the whale.
Through a certain lens, you think, here is a moment adjacent to, or inside of, some incessant hunger. Which repeats until it breaks. Which breaks only when it kills the host. Above us, as storm of a century (another?) ––and below our feet, until the raft where we were standing is also gone. This was hunger, too. And the sea sounds to be made of a hunger all its own, but this is not what it is. That swallows us. This is not what it is that has fed and ferried. Us between homes where we dream of the floor of it. From where we go looking for the floor, in vessels and with instruments. Sometimes we do not find the floor. Sometimes the vessels do not return. Sometimes they return to tell us that the floor is home to life for which we have no name, that the floor is an opening to something else, a liquid earth that rises through its own cracks, spreading.
Riding fault lines.
Consider the weight of water after rains against fault lines and the weight of our collected lives, how it takes not so many earthquake memories to learn that it is a matter of time until the next one, but this is the land of billboards training the witness into submission to a hunger that drives on to speed out branching interstate miles into state route highways flying toward the next bite, flesh riding the wind of the last win into the next investment cheered by a chorus calling Act Fast, Act Now, Don’t Miss. Out. It’s coming, they told us, the screens our suns in constant revolution around us, projecting new worlds of pleasure and war. Something rumbled and we caught each other’s eyes, looking up. What is that? one of us asked, and the voice of an invisible speaker said Now.
