_
Pikthall is a writer.
Note: This poem was composed with the help of my four year old daughter.
A shadow blends then softly sways,
It hangs and bends, mirrors and plays.
A thread unwinds then turns anew,
Back to dark where few pursue —
A whispered breath, a quiet sigh,
The night folds open toward the sky.
A wave pulls back then moves again,
A whirling dance of loss and then —
The edges blur, the lines combine,
Between the dark and fading shine
A searching hand, a sudden sight,
The endless curve of looping light.
_
Pikthall is a writer.
strange to be so quickly crushed
the forces of right and real and gone too soon
turning toward distress, despair, delirium.
broken by ordinary dreams while
staring at stars.
strange that yesterday arrives today, that
the plants and aphids change partners endlessly.
an old woman used to live in that house up there;
if an animal was on the road she’d run it down
with her Oldsmobile—she said it
was “bettah-forum.”
roads lead to common destinations.
and tonight a young man rides in the back of an
ambulance, five holes in his lonely chest,
body becoming cadaver as the
ambulance slows in pace,
turns off its lights.
strange that tomorrow arrives today, that
the plants and aphids change partners endlessly.
strange the resiliency of the last reprieve.
strange that the people circle overhead.
Mastodons wash slowly ashore,
atomized in miners’ gold-gravel
They arrive with no pretension to truth
alive in the visible form of disappearance
city-bound inside metal vectors
Annihilated by longitude and latitude
natural surroundings surrounded
surging forth, the mastodon confronts death again
in the grotesque picturesque of the lens
in the screaming reappearance of the screened
The state of the world in our absence
preserved for our presence, is a décor
dictated by decree and demanding irony --
like the fly, with its faceted eye and
broken line of flight
An asymmetry
Unveiled for censure alone
Thrown, twinned and twisted
Ensnared by the white-mosquito
Or mile marker 11-44
Premonitions of tragedy
Everything
An act of
Willpower
When systems dissuade themselves
Bodies coalesce and thrash about
Absorbed in energy of their opposites
Vengeance is confined to special effect
Revolutions to equilibrium
Devolving forward
Death unravels itself
In exquisite seduction
Dead hands reach backward
For the ellipsis
As carcasses collapse
Confused and convulsing
Caught flat-footed
On the crumbling
Foundation of things
ways of doing
layers linked to lines
called edges
a sequence of 0s and 1s
AND, OR and NOT
each enter from above
depending on
an array of gates
a circuit
appropriate according to
predetermined formats
languages
windows
a nightmare
resulting in number
in time
one way of one
Roots traverse
The water table and the sky
Life eats life
Survival and violence
Grafted here in copulation
Convexed in a condition
Of pure exhibition
as
a precursor
a people
chamber the clefts
the apertures
the walls of
young gills
the primitive form
decomposed or burned
an unweaned child
taken into the lungs
then expelled
as man
the tragedy of joy
will be published
in the lights
a poem on
private archives
the process
multiple
Comforted only by the promise of
Successive approximations
A curious detail weaponized
And woven into the background
Jackals wallowing in
Other people's blood
the triumph of the desert
is geometric —
dictated by event
circumscribed
by geology —
self-liquidation on a hill
in the valley
