My pen has blacked out the page.
Scratching through paper, day after day,
but my mind is in a cage.
my words are hollow, I have nothing to say.

This prison is crowded,
inmates claw at my temples.
But my key is shrouded,
I want to let them out but it isn't that simple.

Are they clawing?
Maybe they're praying,
I need to stop withdrawing,
Life isn't about staying.

It's about going,
and I am lost.
I am slowing.
What is the cost?

Crouching slick faced in the depths of the pines,
Drums are echoing in me like dead men.
The forest always knows how it will end,
The thick autumn painted crimson with blood.
The deer murmurs as I slowly take sight
And ran for miles after his mortal wound.

Through ravines and thorns I carefully wound:
His corpse was still beating among the pines.
Cone-needle bed is his funeral site.
Death has become the tooth-scarce grin of men.
My hands are on the shoulders of my blood:
A burden he must carry through the end.

Not long after this the deer filled the end
Of our truck and the ragged red-brown wound
Pained my eyes, hissing at me as the blood
Fled from it like a warrior who pines
For home. We cut him apart with old men
And the winter made our breath turn to sight.

Two months later my kin’s ribs are the sight
That tell me it is all about to end.
Where once stood muscle now lay paper men
Leaking memories, ready to be wound
In the splint’ring rigidity of pine
And finally make good their debt of blood

We are starving without the nature-blood
And the black smoke pollutes the holy site
Where killing became living in the pines.
Now there are machines living at the end
Of my fence, chewing on the trees, wounding
My mother with the oiled claws of un-men.

I meandered slowly towards the dead men
Now laid enshrouded deep within the blood
Of the forest. I am the living wound
Among the trees. Wooden markers show sights
Of a generation shortly ended.
There is no life among the wretched pines.

Now coming are the haunted men who pine
for the forest of their blood, but the end
has come and earth-wounds are their only sight.

The force of habit
drives me
to ****** noses
and
cracked ribs,
crushes me
down into the
dust,
grinds my
bones
down into
brittle sticks.
The force of habit
drives me
to drown,
to seek
sadness,
avoid the sun.
Why?

Can't you see?
Just look out of you.
This beauty
comes not only from within,
but from farm, field, mountain, and glen.
Happenstance and luck had no place
within what is simply heaven's grace.
But yes another gift was choice,
and yes what shakes is my voice
because I cannot force
this society's course.
I cannot show you this is real,
that it is not just how I feel.
That this is truth.
This is light.
But what hurts the most
is seeing the ghost,
the old you,
the knowing you,
the you that's gone.

Can my poems touch you?
Can they make you feel?
I tell you what I think is true,
show you what is real.
How could my poems touch you,
maybe make you kneel,
if when the day is through,
even I can't feel?

I bled my words but none landed on the paper.