A Small Song in Flames
What I want miles from here keeps on not ceasing beyond my ends,
that the manyfaced I, conscious of and in empire, will one day die?
It says “me” in so many proper names, the city burning down,
place itself on fire, and we inside it smiling.
Smiling, glad of a death. What we called love was not enough
though it was supposed to start the world, a veined vacuum, until
waterbirds that are decidedly not us sit swimming and reflective.
Glad of this death, we are like knives in the freedom, glad to be
stabbing through the sound of other things dying. It spoke: we were free.
Seconds boxed us contiguously ‘til radio reports came as news.
Love, brotherhood, a dead possum, insidious froth: is the idea of God
obedient to me? On what dull rock was the firebringer split?
My we, that which I am is, sums in fire: I mutate between friendship’s legs
in feeling’s storm. Ash is slowing down. Love’s born in a furnace of doubt
indefinitely, until knowing is a series of rooms, successive nights, cubed
flesh for consumption, apes in the brain reeling with fever
by physics brought down again., every time. The spirit of gravity sings
a long song. I found happiness young between your legs, where lips flare
a mouth more about us than us, and a pulse of juice tastes
of shine. No death breathes safely this shower of raintears coming
and coming again and again, as we spend a soon-dead body’s heat.
We are almost glad to have translated this slavery into freedom,
this subject’s flesh glowing blown by fire and want, as disaster’s previous
sequel, that you and we come first and last.
— Karl Parker