Thursday, June 21, 2012

fistful

fistful

this is not waste
this is not failure
this is not lazy
this is not
what it is not.
it is what it cannot
begin to claim
to name
because,
to know it-
is to
become
that other same.
there is no fame
that is real.
o, gets you to your destination;
where accolades take an inch
and every blame takes us only partway,
dropping us off, dead of night
at some seedy turnpike
with no one to call upon
we walk alone
swollen and bruised.
sloughing off our bark.
we're street fighting, still.
we are fists of potentiality,
of poems weeded,
actually.
smashed out teeth with their roots dangling
an electrical fire, graffiti orange,
speaking in tongues from birth on.
they are still
born.
the hypocritical
bureaucracies
making lumber
out of the numbers.
but we're fists of trees,
every ring, is
every marriage,
line after line
there is no escaping
what we are forever loyal to,
how can we leave, when it's-
how can we stay?
Where is there worth going,
beyond this fistful of rings,
goldening, goldening, us
like a fistful of summer ash.
where we are really
worth more than our
weightlessness,
and then some
against that hardening mass.


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