a whole sky to be turned to ash in my lifetime
whence no phoenix of our kind rises:
beetles, bacteria and capitalism proved immortal.
the train approaches the precipice; the closer
to the engine, the more comfortable and powerful the passengers.

children cry up from the depths of debt for bread and help and shelter
met either with the ideologue's injunction "austerity!"
or deaf ears and money
invested in guns, bombs and rhetoric.

a whole body to decay and to bloom,
to stray through the fields and into the tomb,
with hands
to give shape to screaming heard only in the shadows of my eyes

to trace out the grand design of my doom
to articulate on pages my sense of suspension in dread

to caress another body and forget it all in our ecstasy

or perhaps to lend freely, so as to build sandcastle-utopias
together, on the shores of the blood-red sea of history
by the monotonous waves and the sorrowful, joyful,
invisible, indifferent, post-anthroposcenic tide approaching.

a whole body to be wasted or used,
to be thrown into the fray or a figure of privilege abused:
an opportunity, or a catastrophe.
we must chose, we must chose.