I stand up[-]on no hill

I revoke your peak

I crawl a little ways up to

Sample the slopes of this valley

 

I slide back down again

 

Left with my morsel,

I'll stay and die—

Starve and wind about myself

 

Nothing is the best thing you can find here...

What words can be spoken to quell the dread here?

 

God shot us down—we plunged into dust

God shat us up and outward—we stumbled and crashed into truth

 

The birds are beside themselves

Children are playing with dirt

 

Leave us with our stones and glory

Leave us with our silt and stones

Leave us with our leaves and things

Leave us laying openly,

effigies of the past atop splintered billboards

and tombs filled in with roses and concrete

 

... Death is a future

—Death is a mantra—

Linea viridis gyrat universa?

 

I tasted the fruit of all that could've been,

But hoisting it, half-eaten, before a mirror only showed me Headless

 

I reveled and quaked in silent stillness

And allowed love to pass me by, vanishing fast into the rifts between my dreams

 

I stood, Bornless, before God for a single, incomprehensible moment

Just to neither see nor hear from her again...

 

And now—no matter dying!—I only ask upon

What hill in particular you expect me

To find what has never been

 

(Every day flat and blank unyielding the same beaten out washed-up land grayed, shadowed, dis-defined.)

 

I thought I might as well scramble up those slopes here or there,

Now or then,

Just to take a little taste,

 

But it was all cold ash between my teeth,

Another mirage welded firmly to mind,

 

A toy gun to a mannequin's head,

And all the birds—in their crazed mumurations carried upward,

Crying openly on the wind—beside themselves...

... Still