Category: ritual

Parasite

I project myself onto a new world

Which is not mine, but simply becomes mine.

These become moments when something happens

And nothing happens. I exist tangled

In marginalia, a handwriting

Stitched upon the edges. Another book

Becomes a palimpsest to my tired thought,

A filter to strain away the slither.

Roman priests examined the intestines

Of animals slaughtered for sacrifice.

To devine auguries in the moment,

When something happened, and nothing happened,

They would take the eviscerated signs-

The clots of blood, the bits of flesh, as truth.

(November 30, 2018)

A Confession Must be Heard

 0c7f3209a8ff06ca85dd4c351e9a91acc6d09f59

Much of what I write these days

sounds like a rote confession;

yet, I am no savior, even to myself.

So to hear the nuance thicken

around a verb in my own ear,

I must speak a native tongue;

and like all true stories I tell,

I shape myself to a form

which best suits my desires.

I collect what is at hand,

charting all my little failures

as profound, as if the paucity

of my life could ever be enough

to transcend these humble clichés.

 

(May 31, 2108)

Against the Background of the World’s White Noise

 maxresdefault

Repetition runs counter to chaos.

The steady tap-tap declares one

to be; it belies the random

scratch upon the prison wall.

Only for a moment one rises

above the skitter of rat’s feet

through dry straw to say it

again: I am here, I am here.

 

Too often ritual’s condemned

as too difficult a constraint

to work within. Yet, there is no

freedom in the sun’s fire and fusion.

Freedom’s found in the patterned

improvisation of predictability.

 

(May 7, 2018)