I am to walk the country of dead men
with a ration of splintered glass
and a canteen ruined by bullet-holes.
Already, the air abhors me.
I have made a crutch of sick and wearied bones,
thigh and pelvis set with stains of life,
and I find I lack the strength to gasp.
They have hung a terrible stone from my neck.
This journey is lit by only the suggestion of a sun.

I take the first step.
I tremble with mortality
and falter.
No genius mind compels a corpse to walk.
This is what I have become
a locus for suffering.

Now sutured to the earth
a mesmerized visionary
feeling the thoughts of my own blood
as the hammers of God beat me down
and all that I have lost becomes my muse

I see... so much.

The propulsion of stardust.
The internecine romance of gravity.
I watch the seed of the world
blossom with ephemera.
Microbes in unfathomable armies,
the arc of the universe bent on their death,
the singularity of life
and on.

I see the first smile.
The first magical tea party.
The first awkward kiss at the bus stop on a rainy Monday.
The first fireworks.

But there's more. There is far more,
and I should be so privileged.

I see the first time a man laces up his own noose.
The first little girl to drown in the swimming pool.
The first best friend to die in a car crash.
The first backyard abortion.

And this is where I am,
this nation of carrion with its unknowable sky.
Nothing here is not naked.

The blasted-out skulls of child-soldiers.
The beggars and the brain-dead, every cannibal of sympathy,
miniature kings with uranium crowns.
All the churches reeking of napalm and salvation.
Recreational murder.
A soccer riot. A chemically-castrated priest. A death-insurance salesman.
A pair of slit wrists holding hands.


I would ask the sky, but this stone shall suffice.

How... how is this for me?

This is how it is
to breathe winter,
to capture the last of those warm dusks
in an inescapable sigh.
An endless letting-go.

And the aurora is so cold,
describing the name
of this inanimate sky
as I sit among a trifling solace,
a rare, pristine devastation
and contemplate art,
my only company that
distant eagle's cry
and the patient seduction of the water.

But ever to return to the waking,
the dismal structures
of this material cosmos –
bastion of all my weariness,
the perpetual beckon
to the imprisonment of a heart.

Here, the hostel of dimming days,
this asylum of my disrepair,
my still-life,
filled with the unfailing echo
of those stifling breaths,
of self-destroying honesty

and damnation in dreams.