"Consequences Upon Arrival (ii)."
"We woke into the morning undressed.
Every thought washed of color and their chains rusted over.
Wind howled and fell and whispered beneath the brush.
And we with it, bottoming on purpose.
But that was not our gift.
Without softness.
Without thesis.
It was difficult to understand the reach of the occasion
or to whom we owed the honor.
Our only meaningful thought flooded crevasses of pain.
Pain that was simple.
Fundamental as the air before rain.
The circumstances formed around our suffering
decayed from the point of initiation inward.
This so abandonment became common.
We trained our ears to wake and comprehend the hour.
Deliver oxygen. Rest one foot in its light.
We rose our heads only to say, fuck learnedness.
Behavior that could only exist in the mouth
acquired by failure.
To articulate and reform the needle
drawn up into the roof of its suffering.
We weren't going back--
not one night, we said-- to that disease-shaded landscape.
That puss in sheep's clothing, though desire
was tied to its awning.
Context required no record.
Met us squarely in our eyes.
The eye that awned.
The loud, immeasurable eye.
The eye hugging the feet of our failure
required a trust that could only be offered between streams.
Or given in the rivers that fed themselves.
We woke with dreams pulled through a fine, intelligent
point.
This thorn was a fundamental characteristic of our sides.
History was outlined in our ruin of stitches,
re-scaled specifically as though we weren't there.
Language returned through the appearance of clouds.
Furtive.
Deeply shadowed and offering nothing.
We stood adjacent.
Looked up and rubbed our arms.
While not offensive, it's inappropriate to remain
in the procession and offer nothing.
Not shade nor rosettes.
No part in restoring the fence.
Neither the most obvious: rain.
We should start a committee someone said.
THE COMMITTEE TO COMBAT LANGUAGE THAT
DOES NOT OFFER RAIN, of which the goals and bylaws
would be as erotic as they were without a single tooth.
We woke to vandalism relative to the committee.
Someones it seemed were, in their quiet nighttime way,
against what they interpreted as the public shaming
of non-productive existence.
For the first time in memory, accountability was on the table.
It was bulbous and moist.
It absorbed all of the blame, which
it absorbed all of the blame which was not at all called for.
It said, I have introduced ideological context.
I ruined the stitches.
I don't feel seen.
I'm absorbed by failure.
I drink from the river and feel nothing.
My gaze depletes.
It is me to whom you owe great honor."