Hello sludge, how is the hammering?
Are the bricks sinking nicely down your sweaty grungy grime?
A house isn’t built in a day.
Take your time.

What a joy you must be having!
The grit-in-your teeth-taste only gets better the more you writhe and cry.

Labor of love on this sunny day - squirm!

We revel in this lie.
We watch him strive,
with all his might,
to make a home
on a bed of
blazing tar.

For us like any other fugitive,
Like the numberless flowers that cannot number
And all the beasts that need not remember,
It is today in which we live.

So many try to say Not Now,
So many have forgotten how
To say I Am, and would be
Lost, if they could, in history.

Bowing, for instance, with such old-world grace
To a proper flag in a proper place,
Muttering like ancients as they stump upstairs
Of Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.

Just as if time were what they used to will
When it was gifted with possession still,
Just as if they were wrong
In no more wishing to belong.

No wonder then so many die of grief,
So many are so lonely as they die;
No one has yet believed or liked a lie,
Another time has other lives to live.

This restless night I summoned history.

It comes to me as a sound:
two tones, and an image:
one lonely satellite-
cold and empty,
drifting,
my eyes see nothing but stars.

My weight in cells,
particles
metabolizing and collapsing,
carry on
through time and space,
until,
eventually-

I return again.

Oh how it must itch-
The lady whose body is
Covered in hard plaster.
Finely carved face of alabaster.

The miracle maiden!
The matriarch with
The eternal smile
Could never feed
A hungry child

The dress she wears is a
Skin tight suit.

Shield atop shield.
Even in the heat.
her sweet baby ****
Burning beneath
Layers upon layers.

Prayers upon prayers
Would only save her.

My hair is a mess of antennae-
Each piece picks up static of days
dead and gone.

I run through the noise with unmanned hands- feeling the weight of each lock.

Where’s the golden child?
The girl with a head full of health?
Of ringlets
yet to be devoured by time, sweat and dissonance.

As I drift I hear the voice of my mother fading- her chord was cut and motioned off-air in the wake of new administration.

Memories trapped in the roots of straightened strands. Her signal comes through as a muffled cry:

“These ends may be swept away,
but my music will still play
through your stereo.”