gritty.

[lillithhalfjack]

Here's to Killing

Here’s to killing. Here’s to screeching
rubber-burned through happy standers-by,
to the bomb like a small sun
born above the city. Here’s to murder,

manslaughter, the lexicon of -cides: where Cain
slinks back from the lamb-specked pasture,
a prince goes epileptic over bitter wine, or a boy
drops the gun by his wound-bleached mother.

Here’s to the noose, to the mortar, to the spear
so patient in its palm-draped pit,
to the death ray arriving from a distant planet
to melt the trees into brownish scum. Friends,

here’s to killing-not because it’s fun,
but because the days fill up with static,
because the limbs go numb from sitting,
because anyway we can’t run

from the inside-out gas creeping through the city
or the tumors that swallow our bowels as we sleep-
because, at last, we must succumb. And so
we have a duty: To break. To bleed. To go

quietly dumb in our book-lined studies
or cough ’til our lungs give up their longing.
Which is to say, we must receive.
So here’s to giving.

Sean Bishop, from Hayden's Ferry Review.




sometimes i don't know what your words mean.
the works won't budge. they just giggle and run off the page...