To Recuperate Our Cosmic Inheritance

I don’t want to be another silent casualty of time.

This body, floating like a sheet in the wind
filling out baggy clothes but underneath empty.

Invoked in a cloak of your own mystery.
Plasticine internecine creeping like hemlock leaves.
Rain catcher redundancy
rots the only, call of the lonely
slaughter in the stony sky.

Sword stuck in the sheath.
Silver liquid drumming mercury.
I need the sound of un-sheath,
the slickness of metal unbecoming.

And so,
Seized by the heat of the meteor
that was your hand
that held
the heat.

I’d do anything to forget.
I’d do anything to remember
it clearly now.

And in the wake of constant crisis
it is always surprising how much beauty this world holds
and how such a small body can hold too so much sorrow.

How much rain must I borrow?

The Leash by Ada Limón

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

A bundle of black ink
waits by the door.
As it pools, you sink
forevermore.

Ruinous tide turns the bricks underneath
to the sand untouched by sun down below.

Tale of me
doomed by a love unbestowed.
Tale of me
bathed in sorrow and woe.

Anything that touches me
sinks, so very slow.

I know I don’t know.
I know depths uncovered will always
blind me to the depths unknown.

When the wave calls destruction,
it reaps what it sows.
When the moon shines down on me,
I shine too I know.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
        In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
        Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
        Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall die and dry in
        Lost Carcosa.

https://americanfuturesiup.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/ursula-k-leguin-coming-of-age-in-karhide.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3jITti6eRqt1Qa2izQ31cbHEEjSiWSb76plbYb-N40XDVxQ85x85lQI7A

We Shape Each Other To Be Human

We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls,
floats, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move,
the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word.
Not yet. And so I don’t remember “flying.”
I remember falling upward through the golden light.

Something I could not locate anywhere,
some part of my soul, hurt
with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain.
I was afraid of myself: of my tears, my rage,
my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body,
like me. It felt like something else, an ill-fitting garment,
a smelly, heavy overcoat that belonged to some other person,
some dead person. It wasn’t mine, it wasn’t me.

Praise then Darkness,
and then suddenly the startling silvery rush of a single voice
running across the weaving, against the current,
and sinking into it and vanishing, and rising out of it again.

Trying to ignore the heat and cold,
the fire and ice in my body,
And failing into harmony
till dawn came and I could go sing again.

Here it’s always Year One.
On New Year’s Day, the Year One becomes one-ago,
one-to-come becomes One, and so on.
It is that way, that timeless world, that world around the corner…
Yet as I write I see how also nothing changes,
that it is truly the Year One always,
for each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.

The immense house was very quiet.
Its peace sank into me.
Again I felt that strangeness in my soul, but it was not pain now;
it was a desolation like the air at evening,
like the peaks seen far in the west in the clarity of winter.
It was immense enlargement.

And falling upward,
Upward through the golden light,
I was in love forever for all time all my life to eternity with

Dominion of Tomorrow’s Mineral Exigencies

to make everything national
reservoir radiance at the ready
tax-exempt lake by the town hall
how often we talk
makes me feel the weight of time
lost inside the system
hidden rhythm extends
the walls that generative
hem me in
top flight cruise vacation prison
the walls that open-plan
tell me where and when
the treasure is hidden
the search ends before it begins
black gold impales my wrist
string me up for even trying to
think of limiting no limits
sunrise always surprising
eternal night underlies it all
everything is temporary
but is nothing?