Locks

In our island shelter on the flat world,
it seemed to be better to just stare at a leaf
than to talk with people set to mining
our experiential resources,
taking notes and passing them on to priests
for better birth control.
But hundreds of years couldn't erase their perversion;
piercing the ground with a sword and praying to the hilt
had seemed like a paradox.
They were too clever to elude, but then,
so was a wreath of myrtle,
so we went to leave.
Because everything was like everything then,
the locks kept changing their appearances.
Though if you would just a hum a tune,
the hanging lights above us would flicker
like the sound of small bells.

So walking out after landing,
the night came down like it always did;
the darkness on the edge of sight
flew into itself over and over.
We soon found ourselves exhausted by the witch hunt,
sunburned red, and our knees grown weak
from kneeling to the farmer's scythe and superstition.
So we saw the moon, reflecting something after
the blue hour came and we followed it.

Eventually we found the native totems
charged with anima and vertical disclosure
and burned them up, this time for the desert,
our expansion wrapping itself
in such dreamcoats and now-vestigial allegories.
We could have waited years for better moral focus,
but their old world became a reservation,
and proponents of race superiority attended repeated rehearsals,
great blasts from fire hoses.
So we pushed ahead of the wake of it,
while some of us found ourselves walking on broken glass,
sewing yellow stars on our rags and boarding trains
that fell through the hole in the world into Purgatory
when the sun rose on Easter.

The witnesses craned their necks inside,
saying that our party and their new land was some farce,
asking us to modify our claims
so as to be motherly impulses
that they could trade for some pulp invective.
Instead, we transposed all of it
into subsets to be read by natives
of another assemblage,
swinging ropes across the construction site.

All the time I was with you then I wanted to live in some dream,
to get as close as I could ever get to you,
but I had to catch this fly buzzing in your mausoleum
and examine the visitors' flowers,
finding the storms that swept them up wanted less company,
as was usual.