I. Day

Every breath I take
is in the face
of what I feel
writhing beneath
black, iron springs where I sleep;

I turn from a dream,
to the wheat-yellow, morning light.

Is it another dawn or another dusk
I see slathered
above the frozen dew?

Are you,
(oh, distant, blurry rays)
another harbinger or another lark?

Is the yellow light,
like a wheatfield
in spring or in winter;
left with the scars of a screaming sickle
or mounds marking seeds,
shallow,
in impossible soil?

Both seem barren.
Light illuminates,
showing all things to be the same,
as light is morning-born.
And all is shown barren and blank.

Day starts moving.
I grow tired.
“How very dry,”
says I.
Though not aloud,
instead I just stare
until dry day is also done,
(like me)
no longer there.

II. Dusk

At dawn,
the road out my house,
is crumbling and black,
and light is lacking
over endless mountains.

Whether or not
morning was a harbinger or lark,
everything dies by dark.

I must go for a run;
idle distraction
is the only passionate lover
for us sad sacks
of mutilated guts and grain.

so my feet beneath me,
the twin feet beneath,
one over another,
leave the black and unto brown.

my heart pumps,
lungs pull in,
with each pull being,
a mad, backward rush
to slow my iron blood’s
turn to murky rust.

(out, out-
not too long,
subdue the relief,
remember what that means

in, in-
black spots and cold daggers
through the throat,
spit it out,
suddenly)


among a drifting bank of leaves,
I see an animal femur
and below that,
the rest.

the flesh,
a summer left.
all trueness laid bare.
black fur hid it well,
until the thing was dead.

now I see
the only pure white of life,
hard and hollow.

I place
some paw bones
atop my own
and see
we’re just the same.
a nervous laugh
blows air
out, out.

run all I want,
this is what
I was born to become.

III. Dark

With world’s
heavy, hunting breath
upon my thick neck,
feet move faster over brown,
over steeper ground.

to the mountaintop I must go,
where the world will stand clear below


and as the sun falls
I come upon a rock wall,
where I stop and stand,
heart and soul heaving,
heavily taking in nothing and relinquishing the same.

the wall continues straightly,
(in it’s hard-edged, absolute way)
to a fenced in plain
and above me is the crest
that I cannot reach
before light’s last lark.

the wind blows.
I open
and try to suck life in
from the earth,
where it’s not.

fingers dig into a shaggy tree,
grown between rocks,
birthed
after the wall had made its wooden cut.

I peel off the bark
to touch the soft, cool stuff
that rests beneath.

here,
heart and arteries
must beat freely,
and rightly,
with sugar water.

Whatever makes life breath?
it’s in this goddamn, hard, ridged tree,
who feeds on rays from a chemical sun,
and rises from dead rock,
and blows in breathless wind,
and breathes, breathes, breathes,
separate from the rock, separate from the soil,
until it stops.

god’s gift will freeze
in this frigid winter night,
now that I
pulled off the terrible mask
that had kept it alive.

but I keep peeling,
because I need to see
what pure white light hides underneath.
it might also be in me