Last Saturday (sketch)

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.