illusion and the dust drop

we offer you this bag, good sir,

of illusion

simply slit ‘er open

and find your eyesight broken

i see:

a trickle of dust on my upper arm. It spreads slowly, steadily.

It reaches my elbow.

Pauses

Consults its compass

Continues

Sliding along the rivers of my obtrusive veins, downward, until

My wrist is reached

Pauses

Roadblock

Dilemma

Dead

End

And then my wrist opens

And in slides the dust. Down into my hand Seep into fingertips Compromise blood cells.

Then back up my arm wrap around my neck suffocate my skull drop into my heart fill up my lungs plunge into my stomach engorge every inch of intestine.

Pause

Which leg to take?

It chooses right

And a dust drip fills me up

a dust drip weighs me down

a dust drip lays me on the ground

Then I knit myself together at the wrist and pretend to find the will to move

Ohnosotired. These legs just aren’t worth the effort.

Close my eyes with choked retinas

Cough the slight tickle in my throat away.

Dear tongue, learn better to control yourself.

Later men come with knives and scalpels and promise to open me up and drain me out.

To cut my wrist and stab my arm and poke my heart and pump some new blood

Into my dusty frame.

But then I heard the news.

You just can’t have a body of dust mixed with a body of blood.

Pause

Consult the compass

Do we take this illusion? It works. We don’t move. We don’t think. We don’t even feel

that dust being pumped all inside.

But look at us! We’ve got this dust, see it drip?

drip?

        drip?

it could coat a thousand books

Then think of all the knowledge we could cover!

All the time we could waste!

All the history we could smother!

But look at us! We’ve got this dust, see it drip—wait

I thought I sewed that up?

Pause

Suddenly I’m frightened about this dust, about this wrist, and the way that drip

gives the illusion

of never quitting.

When I woke I was cold.

I lay.

Tired.

When I arose (I arose!) i was thrilled to see my skin was made of bark.

Just look at all this bark! (I thought). We can do things with this. We’re going places!

This illusion isn’t fading.

Just look at that wrist! There isn’t a drippy-damn-drop of dust in that stitch!

a Young Man standing on the sidewalk

a Young Man pg. 15

the river

on the banks of the Euphrates

a small reason to laugh

one man dreams

a child singing of his redemption

creating alphabets

if God created us, we are simply one long sentence
because if i remember correctly
in the beginning
there was the word
and the word was God
and with God

and then later, God spoke
took what was Him
and shot it out to see what would happen
created a few people in his image
possibly possessing a shorter alphabet
but still potential
for provocative interpretation

ever since we’ve just been writing
wringing every last letter for its meaning
creating and destroying our sentences
“a letter to every piece of flesh!” they cry,

every piece of flesh to its Maker

Terse 13

Page 13 of Terse

a Young Man in the Dark

a Young Man pg 14

Terse 12

The 12th page of Terse

Say nothing you walk quietly

Say nothing you walk quietly

past the sycamores and pause at your father’s

oak tree (planted 1963, it ages consistently

twenty-odd-something collected years behind

you) grow slowly now with only one voice

forcing ideas into your thoughts. Sadly

after planting that oak tree your father

spent forty-odd-somewhat disordered years drinking

rum with every dinner and on his sixty-odd-

forgotten birthday he spat his blood into the earth

and dove in after it reaching only six-odd-measured

feet before being missed (by you, pausing

at the oak tree, just past the sycamores).

Terse pg 11

The 11th page of Terse

today

i will not be writing anything

of importance

 

because it’s my birthday

and all of my words have been eaten

by a bizarre case of green tea ice cream