Just a few black spikes
Amid the winter weeds
Are what still stands
Of a frame – is it a barn? –
I don’t remember burning
But it’s not the ghosts this time
Who call for my pail of pity
But the real McBoy – as much as
A 2D cutout strawman who says
All the right things can be.
The fire still burns, apparently,
Though I blew the gaslight pilot off
And there's nothing there for me.
I can’t go back and pretend
I wasn’t burned,
For it made me what I am,
Younger and wiser, a decider now
As long as I will dig my spade
Back amid the horror. The land will cede
To the state soon enough
But what is past
Has moved again to theory,
Potentiality – a way of remembering
What never really happened
And forgetting whatever did.
It’s more poetic, instead of
Grinding what’s left to sand,
To leave it armed and dangerous,
Forbidden as a warning,
Too painful to recall.
The barn – it could have been red,
Could have hosted the unspeakable,
Betrayed squeals of hay bale love.
But the hulk can no longer invite you
To be ashamed.
I played a role.
The mimic frequencies demanded it.
But that was the kind of blaze
You can only walk away from
If you have to change
And I was transformed
At a blade of aching flame.
The sticks convey no shame –
There's no I, who lost his shit,
Lit a match without agency.
It will disappear someday,
When someone unaffected enough
Can bulldoze what remains
And till the land
To someday grow
Something else, not these
Fruits we waited on
Eaten by the birds
We envied in the sky
Like they were never there.
