what did it take for me to miss those days?
crawling breathless,
stomach nails for breakfast, ventricles of rust,
pounding on my ribs with any upright task
from soaking bed delirium,
corroded mind and eyeballs
tortured falun dafa tears
stinging on the walls a glowing red,
my branching veins encasing me in flaming
paths of mystery: to live or die, to try or fail
at simple efforts
--never gone without, since infanthood--
to stand itself a tissue horror
bathing in the needles of another lifeform's hold on me,
that spiral nesting multitasker
legions in the joints,
invading forces claiming spinal tower-riches
as if my thoughts will be my last,
originary flickerings of self, sacked and razed,
the burning out of novelty for bottom emptiness
and only sympathies malinger there--
yet vaster frame invisible to healthy eye emerged:
a sea, empathic with my prior paths from health diverged:
adrenal waves and dolphin plays of other air ensouled i purge
with cascade urges tension mixing universal breath
of statements, fears and wry coercings not to think of death
or tempting near the abolition of a system *****
for all the benison it's bound to store for years
of hiding blind and uttering the shield-word
of our sly, superficial, group-stock lies,
to have us screaming at each other out of only kneejerk love
a mask of fodder from our young dogmatic wanderings
they burn and burn and choke like spirochetes themselves
while shoving under family rugs the truth

cicada shells clung eerily against the burls and branches
of a monumental tree itself a deathly symbol bare of green
like ornaments of rhythm upsurge birthing into death digest
the exoskeletal remains, under finger crunched as
up the bark i climbed
to view what death had taken value on for me, and balanced
up atop the hill of faded names i yearned the meanings of,
and in the clouds
a part revealed
a sunny mist,
to paint me colorful again--
and in that mood a hail began to tick on forest floor:
the brittle dead a singing whisper flaking brown
on brown, on earthy brown to gather white within the paper nooks of leafy drums

how whimsically to service death
anon anon for now they're always lying there
across the road atop the grave hill,
from other species hunted here
but this, that time it was a carved skull
hacked or sawed but yards from peaceful temple yard
another, cleaner omen skull had led me there,
ochre red with emerald mold
the cranial pale divided stop and go
and led me wondering within the stream
to notice other signs i half-expected mystically:
surreal blood abundantly with vulture feathers carpeting the scene:
a stag with missing brain, missing hind and organs
chosen how, i'd never know
--i saw the arrow though, a barb of certainty--
and old fur, gray and white, a timely passing then,
to make of gore a sacred right,
and in hale ignorance i prayed like only atheists can pray
with self-disclaiming smirk but
humble authenticity of unknown forces
biding in the impulse-meaning-gathering of earth,
now memory to glean and hold to live in me