Residual

today’s reason to keep living:  
i thought of this six word story:
here’s a pen, let’s end this.

i survive, a blossom that heaves through winter
like a lonely citystate, an intemperate Sodom
waiting for God’s discrimination. i see it
foaling its own diminishment
when it had no right to colour

me. and i’m reminded of how i
start each morning with an ambered prayer
and end the darkness with a glass bullet
that i have taught how to dance.

still i spin an echo, a copy of
desolation, the weight of a single judgment. i see
the sun spill out of the dull morning. muted and mocked,
caged in iron weights that tug my rusted temples.

i am reminded of how the crosses fell
to the valley floor in blood-speckled shards, amassing
an illness of splintered peaks. my mind, an angry
jury, the whispers start early, night falls fast. still now

my only wish, to find what eloquence
is left to me, as all my times, my paper
admonishments left screaming in streets,
trails and wisps of chemistry and motion

billow through my spectre without sound or sieve.
i know they don't give fingers to blithering arrays
who dream their own dead weight into erotic golems
that pile into a plume of smoke whenever they're forgotten.

i conjure a commonality, my ink in others eyes,
tearing at the chambers of their hearts, running
from their cheeks in slavish bells. it falls to history,
these imprints carved of dust, still i float myself

unturned. redemption, like a rickshaw in my Sodom
street, leaving me of all that winter weight i muster. they see
me - a vital atom of myself, sliding away, laced in
cold imperatives, split and sequenced for a final fall.

the night will fold itself up, collapse in your pocket
and i will taste my own salt as it withers through my blood
in angry alchemy.  it all happened without looking backwards,
without a lesson or a lover’s borrowed god to enact some

last rite, some beatitude to save this shadow from the cave,
to see it living, newly pasteurized of all death and sleep after
three days walled and pursed, entombed, but for the
secret breath that issues from the stem like a headless fount,
remembering.