last saturday
these
sounds, even in the haze:
"bedawze
the sickness
belight the
waste –
bethrone the
barnacle'd husk of this world."
more and
more:
a blitz and
a blight and a shack and a surface
of okra and
solidarity and bad cornmeal – who
were you, my
brother? Blackened? Fuck your husk,
my brother –
i choose the family i chose.
so rise up
and dance with the damned
we walk in
herds with our cousins
we shamble
along
as empty
pages in the back of a book no one
even ever
glanced at or picked up or
wondered
about –
and
improbably,
we demonize
this mortality,
a simplicity
in the territorial coil –
a dead
shackle coated in the slick
grease of
what came before
"you
are warped and ridiculed & yoked by
paralyzing
quiet. you are shackled. you are
shackled. we
are voices in the maze, the string in the
maze and you
are shackled."
And the
night comes on,
a balmy
dream of evening surrounds Shea's
desperate
grief –
he leans in
and the voices mute the
wind
whistling through treetops and
skittering
across chainlink fences –
"we
promise nothing, only offer."
"tomorrow
is promised to no one," Shea says.
