15 December 2019

Undoing the Cypher

A thin red string, tied

around the circumference

of the mess we’ve made,

the drain and the splatter,

the overgrown and unbloomed

munificence, how many times

we’ve lived too much,

leaving only this trail

of plastic and rot,

this blood and myth.

We are more careful now,

learning to contain

certain damages,

learning to forget

certain vocabularies

of bleeding and protest.

We live instead by myths

of the necessary–

A house, a garden,

such shimmering

borders in the mind.

Seasons pass, we do not

venture outside. A  

nameless someone

leaves food and slips

of paper by the door.

Sometimes we go

a full moon

without speaking.

It is like this: dying

slowly, then all at once.

We were told to insist

on the human riddle.

We were told there

would be no satisfaction.

But the page now dry

and white like an empty flag.

The evidence that remains.

Loose papers carried in

by the wind—watch 

how they decay,

become leaves again,

undoing their own cyphers.

We wait, as the music of exile

refuses that final seed of

language, the secret

and torture, the knife

and the name.