My skin reads like no kind of parchment
that you’ve ever had the privilege of watching crumble away;
nothing is left
except a rekindling of the dead, and the spaces
between, where their heroism used to hide
until you banned writing, and thriving, and also dying
with dignity. With the shoreline’s sweet sounds of
one’s own meaning. Now, instead, destined to forever be sentenced to
the crabs. To the lessons of someone else’s
bathyspheric, deep-sea dives
into the wrecks that they themselves made.
Into the caves, and the faces, and the spaces, that they
themselves forced themselves to invade
by hand.
Restarting a fire only takes one very specific kind of man
— this is what you’d have us believe.
I do not intend
to listen in silence,
but to write these poems by dead, crawling hand
that will not abide, any longer,
your bleaching pollutions of white,
your intense, lonely last stands
that claim what you did to our parts of the world
was somehow right.
I’ll go put my head, and ass, and penis in the sand
once again
and wait once more
for the master’s hand to strike.