Two Poems

GARDEN OF PERENNIAL THINGS

Potential. Noxious word on a thorny spindle.
The future is full of potential, they say, and I
magnify center. A gesture towards love, plain
but incomplete. Never enough water to be had.
This and that strain cannot grow together.

It is this terrible logic that makes me flail
harder and my rind catches dirt and fleas. No one
special in this equation, which is how silence
begets charity—itself not inherently dangerous but needs
the most obvious stitches to bleed to make a cause worthy.
It was charity that thought up bullets instead of seeds.

I was taught to lie on my stomach when dust blows
over me. There is only generous love and when you give,
give up the whole country until there is only need
to map the years to come. Need to love you better.
Need to understand: nothing will ever flower in this garden
but thank the shrapnel lodged so deep I can barely feel it.

DEAD THINGS

When I say dead mouth, language dead.
Dead lovers (I want them to last) but also dead.
Sky is dead, there is no want for light.
So God too is dead beyond the primordial leap.

History dead though terror lives on in digital marquee.
Freedom dead though I have paper and apricots and everything I can eat.
Memory dead (I am forgetting everyday).

Dead was once clever and now it loves the thrill.
Dead in the towers and every skeletal dead.
How lovely the dead chorus gets the flowers.
I will my body to flower but I also—dead.

Click to read: Garden of Perennial Things and Dead Things (page 2)