A Word from Your Knife

Any blood licked off the blade
Bleeds in part from your own tongue.

Remember this when you write
In the mood for sacrifice.

Language taught you how to hunt,
And words are edged, but meanings

Lie in the act of the cut.
Blades are not for slicing blood.

Drowned Coast

Self edge, self border, self end, selvage—
Selbend, zelfkant, selvegge—the wave
That curls against the shore of the world,

The hem of the oceanic self,
Attempting to prevent its whole weave
From unraveling, curling its toes

Against the rocks that fray it to threads,
Surf, spray, the hem that’s perpetual
Work to tend, sewn again and again—

Every sense furls a length, every word
Nips bits of thread, and all the gossip
Self pricks itself with, needles and pins

Waves resist. Bolts of cloth fray to waste
Trying to hem rolling oceans in,
And the hard world’s slowly eroded

By selves’ shining edges and borders,
Constantly pounding, breaking themselves
On cliffs undercut and drowned by them.

Your Nature Evolves Your Nature

Walls rarely fall on their own.
Mostly people tear them down.

Mostly people put them up
In the first place. Wonderful

Ape that can go for ages
Living and moving around

Without the need of some thing,
And then suddenly somewhere

Some population starts up
Doing something new, building

Walls for instance. Soon enough
Humans all over the world

Are trying their hands at walls,
Building them, tearing them down.

You’re not a species so much
As metaevolution,

Mobile settings in which things
Like walls can evolve themselves

As parts of your behaviors.
Take hope. Behavior changes.

Take warning. No matter what
You do, doing will change you.

Autonomous Autumn, Autumn of Insects

It’s in the way of words
To be almost ourselves
In the way that the world

Seeks out every small change,
Rings it and leans on it.
It’s in the way of bugs

To swell and diminish.
Yes. Autumn is with us,
Is one way to put it.

It goes by itself. Sing
Crickets, but you’re not it.
Words aren’t it. But it’s us.

Expression and Experience

Dizygotic twins
That merged to become
In utero one
Chimeric infant—
There’s still a struggle,

And they both feel it,
But they don’t know why.
Aren’t they one being,
One person, one life?
One side is at war

With the other side.
The guts disagree
With the headstrong mind.
It’s so disturbing
To not be able

To be free without
Destroying oneself,
Muses expression.
That’s your privilege,
Experience screams

But can’t scream a word
Out of nerves lining
The intricate spine
And can’t express why
Each joint hurts so much.