It’s not easy to rise on a grey day

The devil holds fast to your eyelids

Save the date

In a red circle on glossy calendar 

This day you shall

Unburden

With stones in your pockets

Submerge the doubt 

Tickling in your throat 

That pieces of meaning can stand in for truth

When a bouquet wilts and only dry reminder stills the base

Emptier than my arms, reacting to absense 

As the schoolchildren leave the yard

Dusty from their tumult 

Do they glance back over their shoulder like a bird?

See you standing beneath down pour

Holding residue like strips of meat

Curing 

What ills you is the certainty

Falseness makes a bad vintage

Girls who weed too long in midday Caligula 

Will grow taller and thinner as forced from their way

Toward falsetto 

They strain the sewn parts, with urging and movement

Like clay hands reaching out

Molding ash into penitent figures

Marking desert with immobile reach

With yearning and hollowed reed of papyrus 

Breaching water’s deception 

As we crawled from the sea enveloped in birthing sack

The sea calls us back, to eat longing and kingship in her mighty mandible 

For even rock becomes coral, the concha dual turning to infinitesimal 

Pieces of you, sucked clean of game, rumored on tide

Like birth will always surprise the ill prepared part of us

Believing we are in charge