Salt Theory
Forget science.
What’s undiminished lives in the salt.
The salt lives in the body, in the wound
the body will carry through the dead of years
like a hot coin under the tongue.
Half a pill is greener than a forest field.
Half a syringe is a fireman’s favourite siren song
reaching my ears from the cornucopia of perception.
In the season of rotten apples across the garden
& gravediggers who’ve become so afraid
to touch their lover’s flesh under the night’s
moonless outstare: a certain kind of lacking
finger-deep inside the wet ashes of my cosmic soul.
Body, unbridged, an exiled monarch winged into
the blinding torch of wonder, a heart’s arrhythmic
nibble of grief before the executioner’s last sermon:
We are not the lucky ones: even our simplest
desires are somewhat sufferable. Didn’t we survive
only to pledge allegiance to the sweet irony of elegies?
In the beginning of chaos: a brush-footed butterfly
nests on the razor lip of an axe—palsying wings,
contagious. Salt of its fear, my eternal dooming:
what tongues us open after the fire’s extinguished.