This we are
This you are
This is the rose in the swamp
These the bramble’s teeth
These are beads of me sliding up cords of you, necklace
This is my chest, my empty house, windows left open,
drinking in leaves and the spirit of autumn
This is the grey and shapeless hat, this is the ruined cloth
This is my sweatdamp forehead
This is the furrowed cloud: mirror of furrowed sand under
furrowed sea
This is the choked-back squeal in the bounding boy’s throat
This is the mute dumb cry against the bosom of fate
This is the bolt of Time threaded, snarled, lodged in the wood

And this is the bullshit of my life
This is my false bed, my false walls, my false floor
This is my ladder of grass, my mist-balustrade
This is my coin rolling towards the gutter
This is the watch left smashed in the black velvet
This is the boy in the cage, underwater,
with the shark-bait floating
This is the antennae, severed and crumpled,
and this the aimless ant

And this is your wheel, and this is my stone, and this is my mud
This is my road-shoulder, dark-flowered, mad-flowered
This is my coin blank of number date and name
This is the sleek craft and the wharf-knot loosening

And this is you, again, the C-sharp sustained throughout my life
like a diver’s line
This is the osprey falling with arrow decision
This is the blade-wing of us and the flesh-pond of us
This is funny with the honeyrasp of old knowing laughter
This is our little motif, years-removed, echoing up through
valleys, exploding, suddenly polyphonic, modified by time
and redacted by circumstance

And this is enough to kill a man
And this is enough to bear him up again like a child
And this is the never-uttered, never-polluted,
marrow-language unspooled from the spine,
the twist of the torso, the flinch of arm and face,
the convulsion of breath and thought

And this is the stormed-shore shell
These are my shells of the stormed, still shore
These words, these wants, loosened from mud, choking on air

posted by Snail at 8:25 pm