The trail is long
From where your ancestor stepped before mine,
And meters marked on the stone-cliffed walls
Shores broken and scattered locked hearts,
Hearts to never be unlocked in piss-filled corpses;
Mother’s tears caught in the wind storm
Like the clouds that whisper sweet
London fog and colony muddied and deep
In the carnage dripping between red caged scorn;
Like fathers on trains with maps of time,
Losing it in the spiraling colosseum of gunpowder
And violets loosened from their stems whiten
Black locust, thin and tall and brittle
But never quite broken and all the more dangerous;
Little secluded Appalachian Mountains
The mountain’s tips are younger and lower than the sea’s level,
But the black lamb fodder for the laughing yokel,
Son of clancy and cold yankee;
Little cries for the trodden
Over the clamorous millennium, burning rubber and fire
Forgotten forage gold like hearts left to rot
And it’s a disease, a plague
To plunge two fingers into the earth and feel its death,
Measure the air with spittle on a cigarette
And jet fuel water swirling down the drain;
Locusts and black locusts and cicadas
Mercury and lead and dmdm
Sweet honeyed are the ships trapped in the weeping
And the wailing of a child born yet unborn
The sounds of the deep stirring ocean
Too sudden and too loud to hear
Wind in the sea instead of the sky