#dailywriting — Public Fediverse posts

home at last

home at last where the walls are rumbling,
where the skies are crumbling,
where sheets slicken with silken sheens
blotting sicknesses so defiled,
so revolting and reviled, where every
bed has been made by me
and made poorly; where
long-dead carpenters measured once and cut
twice, thrice, and again – the hourly
wages docked for drinking and
sent home before the work was done; all this
is half-finished, all this
is preamble to prologue. assembly guides
for a world constructed before birth; the
fabric stained in the bolts; the
wood worm-eaten in the forest –
and still, still, this
is home at last.

precipitate

from the roil,
from the boil,
the slush of forgetfulness
frothing; the casting
vapor wafting off;
a hard and shining dust
in the bottom of the pan –
for now, not now, too hot to touch,
but when it cools –
when it cools –
we’ll learn what exactly
was drifting around in there.

fingers in the spokes

there is an allowable amount of horror;
a simmer agreed upon,
a subset of families dragged
away in the night, a volume of dogs
shot point-blank by the state;
human is the excuse-making animal.
given a slow enough stalking
even a flimsy doe will turn and scream
and kick; will try anything
to alert, to defend.
but our threshold are high.
the factory consumes hands;
every day, one or many –
but so long as the product is good,
who bothers to care?

fingers in the spokes

there is an allowable amount of horror;
a simmer agreed upon,
a subset of families dragged
away in the night, a volume of dogs
shot point-blank by the state;
human is the excuse-making animal.
given a slow enough stalking
even a flimsy doe will turn and scream
and kick; will try anything
to alert, to defend.
but our threshold are high.
the factory consumes hands;
every day, one or many –
but so long as the product is good,
who bothers to care?

fingers in the spokes

there is an allowable amount of horror;
a simmer agreed upon,
a subset of families dragged
away in the night, a volume of dogs
shot point-blank by the state;
human is the excuse-making animal.
given a slow enough stalking
even a flimsy doe will turn and scream
and kick; will try anything
to alert, to defend.
but our threshold are high.
the factory consumes hands;
every day, one or many –
but so long as the product is good,
who bothers to care?

fingers in the spokes

there is an allowable amount of horror;
a simmer agreed upon,
a subset of families dragged
away in the night, a volume of dogs
shot point-blank by the state;
human is the excuse-making animal.
given a slow enough stalking
even a flimsy doe will turn and scream
and kick; will try anything
to alert, to defend.
but our threshold are high.
the factory consumes hands;
every day, one or many –
but so long as the product is good,
who bothers to care?

fingers in the spokes

there is an allowable amount of horror;
a simmer agreed upon,
a subset of families dragged
away in the night, a volume of dogs
shot point-blank by the state;
human is the excuse-making animal.
given a slow enough stalking
even a flimsy doe will turn and scream
and kick; will try anything
to alert, to defend.
but our threshold are high.
the factory consumes hands;
every day, one or many –
but so long as the product is good,
who bothers to care?

Once More With —

his eyes went glassy, glassy, grazing
out in the back nine, his fingers reaching
down and plucking mustard
like they used to retrieve tees;
the man with placid face has
gone delicious; gone divine;
become something more than man,
something less than food,
something caught in
history’s mouth, something
ground in the gullet of a tale
as old as time.

THE SIX THOUSAND GODS OF WISHFUL THINKING

They are up there! All of them!
They are watching us with
half a span of attention, they
are watching us and dawdling their phones,
they are surprised how much we’re like them, but
not with any familiarity; any fondness; the
six thousand gods are pretty sure
we’ll get out of this one, we
always have in the past; the twelve thousand
(less or more a few) eyes are drifting away,
through the cool of space to some other
place, with some other people:
it’ll all turn out alright, probably,
they’ll check back
later, maybe,
and see what’s left

beneath one fern

beneath the green a
world of information; a
universe of happenings, unknown
to those big peoples –
beneath one leaf a scent-trail,
a hunt, a war, a
thousand thousand crawling things
that live and die
like us,
that survive
like us,
a sense of scale
the same as us, with
skyscraper oaks outside
their homes;
with grassy, dangerous fields and
water clarifying in tracks as
legible as crater-blasts;
it is all happening always
at every scale,
lesser and greater.

The I

over and over and flying through
the heaps; and under the
shimmer of garbage, the
sheen of filth; over and
over it looks, it listens,
it hears from up there,
over, and over it
glances left, right, center,
and takes in nothing !
and hears nothing !
over it goes, over
corpses of friends and
foes, over corpses of
the still-living, the
still-dying, over !
nothing is enough,
for all is under !
under !
it flies, free,
untouched!
untouching!