broad strokes

It is a liturgy of fast ones, a recitation of questionable declarations and blistering threats, all these lullabies and alibis and mint condition world. It is a question of the efficacy of the whim wham, the juice of that voodoo that you do so well, how the words land on lone wolf and herd. It’s the magic you carry over without too much fuss. They always ask too much, they can never have enough. The details you can work out after its over. The devil’s deftly tucked away, waiting for his cue. The words do what they want to do, the way you want them to. 

Oh to be an organism! Oh to be part and parcel to the squirming earth! Instead of rules and rumors, some late civilization exhibition of the iteration of the book, poems pressed in the open hands of the cradle of signals. A stack of phrases to sway this way and that, sometimes the ball, sometimes the bat. Deft and breathless only when dressed in some strange imagination, sets of questions decorated as evidence, the only light shining your own. The written only ever the stones strewn with bone, blood and feather. Proof of yesterday’s feast.

There wasn’t much to remember, so maybe I remember the little things more. The lip curl, the belly tremble, the moan beneath the kiss. Maybe I make too much out of it because I mattered so little. My fragility well in free fall, my doom plenty nigh. Every urgency of sense and intention met in the imagined now, sunlight and bare flesh, the sacred always another hunger at your heels. Instead, I am only words that are not words, ink that is not ink. A spill of salt and breath in the swelter of summer, a hush of dust and prayers of blood and bone. The sun in my eyes and this flame that burns and burns.