I never swung a wooden sword

At slow bees…

Kept something dying in a box beneath

A bed my father’s father built neath me…

Never fed a mare honey nor seed from my hands

Or held a harp…

These things would melt me

And then, they would have wung me…

Doth the dark precede you

Or simply punk you near ledge, treasure, and lover

In your swift and ample

Doth You stay this sort of motherfucker…

You were amiss before stained glass

Its punishments never pointed at you

Yet you held on bare legs the news paper

Cured body of a deadened cat

Below a porch beside a boulevard

And in all that softening dark

You would return to see it’s sucked flesh

Pulled by days of dirt and degrade from the gentle

Center of its lower jaw…

And you saw

All that was soft to it now had left…

Only Eyeholes, claw and cracking flesh

And it was beautiful before you…

Made you cry and beg for what the day entrusts you…

Made you cry and harden

Finally you’d been given answers you could understand…

You in the lowlight

It in the dark

The coal below all rules and human hides…

Blew white before you in your boyhood…

As you made a pact with depths that you could never make with other children… [sung as "other kids"]

It’s become dead cat clear

I strap no gat to bring the sun back…

Yet you never pet tarantula by blacklight, by a knife collection…

Never took your father’s belt across your face…

Mother’s disease into your breast…

And were you asked at such young age, to spend a year of weeks

Beneath the earth asleep beside either of your grandfathers gone, you would have…

They say the first year of decomposition is most noticeable

Much like and infant quickens to its future self…

And you would talk to their husks in the wheeze of your sleep child chest

And give them grace as they fall to a simpler thing

Of compounds and languaglessness…

Where things are slowed

Respectfully

Respectively…

Where clear it goes…

Tonguing a loose tooth for the blood taste from your gums

Thinking in child alchemy, free of your sum, free of your numbs

Your eyes grinding light from the dark’s slights

Weaving what’s leaking through the porch wood into sight…

When last you met your pet with death

You slipped two triple A’s into its brittle throat..

Wrapped it in newer news print with your hopes…

And buried it forever

In a ply of fading press and yankee boxscores or…

As forever

As decomposition takes it…