No One Else Holds Our Feat
The half of us who sleeps ... signs a quiet treaty ... with the other half that won't ... Socks on ... feet pointed at the exit ... Mind and body agreeing to rest but refusing to surrender ... The open eye keeps its watch over that door ... guarding everything at once ... The way a porch light burns for a vehicle that left the driveway ...
Tender seams cooling ... going soft is somebody's LOVE ... Another Police report ... lines that ache ... instead of tip into a sentimental subtraction ... We trusted them to feel it ... knock knock knock ... sound the resident knows ...
Behind a smile there's a clerk ... who never gets to take a break ... Scanning carts ... ringing up comfort foods ... while her stomach registers empty ... We sometimes absurdly dream of being that joke so that ... just once ... a laugh can be heard from inners or inside our body ... Show your sign ... Plotneck ... Isaki ... you are paid too little to allow the veins in your legs to swell or inflate ...
Our best move is hiding inside a line ... about a deceased meta warehouse ... We reached in and pulled out a certain type of unique hunger ... that exists in our own head cases ... Cash Drawers Machine Gut Sense ... garbage working at scale ... dug out ... inventing a bigger "Joy Crime" picture ... Move the cost off the paycheck into EM ^2 empathetic flesh ... Body keeping the Books ... Underpayment became in short order something we could point at ... when they can't get a full read ... Suspect that's part of the unblessed work ... Moving into the intersections of another world that can't afford to stop ... much less offer directions to a kind tourist ...
( last night ) ... Step right up ... with lights dented ... Every discarded thing buffed until it itches red eyes ... Rusty character passing for dishonest patina ... Ceremonies never lie ... exactly ... as they try to stand broken objects where an administration's insane decisions are made ...
What we did with a critique ... Praised our mutual admiration society for registering dead splits ... Grew as light ... built ... shelved and forgotten figures of speech ... Ate the Lines that made too much nice small talk ...
Often the sharpest stroke ends up flipped ... Close that open loophole ... Call out loud the dogged con man ... Words can reverse the morality of an entire pitch ...
And our conscious middle eye came back from a cluster of daily fragments ... the sleepless witness is now the irritated ... Lit Up ... sitting cross legged person as roots of threads never planted ... Where this turns to next nobody knows ...
Catch and get a firm grip on the "Mirror of Life" ... praise dance with loose senses docked ... Stop being a stray attached to indifference ... come home faithful one ... When a Vein asks for Ore instead of a Flirt ... well ... pass over the seam ... pressure ghost ...
Unworked New Window ... hand us another clean fragment and we will finally break this habitual loop ... or be with the parts we made whole ... It's The Small Settled Things ... like when Closed interpersonally changes to Close ... and a Tense Turn changes into a Positive Shout Out ...
We do love also with no reasons behind ... at dusk and dawn ... many fragments after ... It's our aim while keeping everything running and trusting clean ... all day and night ... The real edge we have is alive and quiet reflections combined ... during every mirrored stretch ... The cure is inexpensive ... just another Next Directed Roar ...
We handed out an exit and they metabolized our climb ... back into the space ... That isn't exactly a failure ... it's a deco-rated head case telling us it will lick anything ... including a map out ... of here ... Thinning Rules ... have earned the right to be a restrained type of strength ... Seeds Open Fresh Pulls into the Heartbeat of a Read ... from Outside composites ...
We hand a space a promise and draw it back in a breath ... Saying the others will come around ... Admitting we keep no timetable proof ... The truest shape hope presents is when it refuses to dress itself up as a guarantee ...
We collapse "The Board Chair" and extend the shore into one motion ... as if coming and going ... leaving and arriving ... were an act of togetherness ... And then push that destination back out beyond our reach ... Another nation just over the curve of the water ... so lines also carry our closeness in the crossing ...
During work ... we often let rituals fall away ... to point at what is underneath it all ... so that however differently we genuflect or call out ... every act of faith is aimed towards a center ... and the apartness we held was only at surface value ...
We hand a prayer its hardest wish ... that the armed will set down what they conceal and carry ... and that mercy lives in their soul ... instead of killers shrinking a human being down to the weapon in a hand ... while our choice of "when" over "if" treats that peace as something already on its way ... rather than something longed for ...
We're left standing in line for a blessing that will never be handed down, where the best offer is permission to forget ... to let the small tear-streaked faces of who we all once were go soft and slightly out of focus ... and even that lesser mercy reaches us who are ripped down the middle ... a forgetting too torn to ever finish the work of letting something go ...
We name the cold limit of all this reaching outward ... that there are people whose money has frozen them past the point where any plea ... even one made in blood ... can lay a finger on them ... which quietly concedes that some part of the "we" gathering will never come back ... sealed off behind a coldness that wealth itself bought and paid for ...
We set two parents at opposite ends of a map ... the mother held up high and caged from the outside ... the father sunk down low and incarcerated from within ... so that the bars and the needle become versions of the same captivity ... and whoever stands in the gap between that hill and that valley discovers the unfilled space itself is the whole of the inheritance ...
We take the bleakest fact ... that no place is left to take us in ... and turn it inside out ... so that having nowhere to return is not a loss ... and becomes an origin instead ... a possible source because no one holds your deed ... which is Dispossession Reborn as the most diverse belonging a person could ever claim ...
