On The Interior Lives of Insects


I don’t know but I do know that when I
know I’ll know it

the world spins faster and faster, flattens
to a disc, a symbol applied like a grinding wheel to
rustspots in the larger frame of things
but the wheel won’t beat the rate of rot
and we are drifting much too far apart
where light cannot cross
and the wheel fragments in a shatter of shooting
stars.

descriptors of set and scene.
the sun goes up and down and up and
down the world wobbles like a child’s
toy at the end of its tether and now it is
fall and now it is spring and now it is
summer and now it is all wrong—
the deer have dropped their
horns and the leaves have leapt and
everything of course is the same in its
perpetual flux
send me won’t you please
the sun cuts a pale ribbon bisecting blue
days from nights flickering manic like a strobe light.

hands of clocks like fanblades
like the whirring workpiece on a lathe
into which one finds oneself drawn screaming by
hair or shirtsleeve, pulled headlong through the
vast unhesitating machinery of time
whose drive passes unacknowledged
this howl to endless tandem suns in one
great streak, issued already flat
from a form yet young but
already dust
send me to heaven

some words you write just to shout
and until then they lay there dead on the page
and who knows what happens to them after that.
the ghosts in my knotted soul will quiet
for a while.
dawn comes, I guess, and you
carry on.
that’s what you do.