When last my eyes were open, I was twenty three and most everything was the same.
At twenty five, my pens all ran their ink into the rivers and washed out four years in the flood,
days scattered and gathered and scattered again without thought or remembrance.
With no one to mourn, there are no new gravestones, only femurs bleaching in the grass.
II.
Somewhere, it was lost, a scrawled note clutched too long in numbed fingers.
Years slipped, wandering the pastoral, more of Bacchus than Diana. Abandoned,
blackened doorframes; within: only mouse paw and moth wing.
In absence, one's smallness flares. Bright beacon of something forgotten,
garish and brash enough to call out predators. Then the ripping and feeding.
Later, the ashes.
III.
What remains: a definition with no reference, a word with no mouth to speak it.
I am but a child asleep in the dirt with a knife in my fist. I still dream of ink,
more often of teeth. At dawn, the ghosts soak into my flesh, new pink scars:
something has grown where nothing is living.
To call forth the hero is to conjure the dead, but the bones lay salted and burnt to dust.
No comments:
Post a Comment