S-t-a-p-l-i-n-g: Reflection

Ear-length

Arms-length:
A measure of distance outdated, decayed, replaced by the sonic that serves both benign and ballistic, of wills.

Ear-length is what matters, most modern of measures.

Javelins, made before time, tore tiger-hides. Men paid by limb, or life, at rebound fury, of big-cats’ bellowing return, of mutiny, bezerk.

Time. Pressure. Selection. Sapien.

Saw-tongue shaved and shaped. Weft of vocal nothing, made substance, became.

Language art, lead to artillery

From thrones fell Kings and Queens, in broken self, abolished esteem

Bombarded minds, departed peace, left behind

War-heads, filled of hate-crimes, waiting

To be.

Earthbound

Well beyond fifty and folding
As legacy leaned over doubling form,
With grasp all steady, hinged at fingers
Flecked of age, of agony’s wilt
Of forgotten years, flung
As the carefree of youth, unfurled and flayed
With weightless of wings, timeless,
Unbound –

Caught wind with patience, wound
With belly-nest of hands, a trifling soft
That nursed and nurtured
The blossom of rose and brilliance, of recall
That followed the felling of flesh
And the certain of autumn, that death
Was alive in the undertoned, echoes of earth
In what solitude the silence of maggots, have churned
With fervour, endless
Like flow of your fingers, now pressed
At the seam of your last days.

Dying Room

Where solitudes never sleep
On the crusted browns of bamboo, latched
At flank of newborn, slung
By the flaccid gaunt, of their forearms –
Fastening the ritual frail, of frames
In etiquette set for the feast, of gangrene.

Where the wasted shroud of reject
Is etched as an echo of truth
On every wall that dare face, the defaced
And vow never to expose, the entrails
Of end-trail moments, of gasping, heaving
Corpse of toddlers’, belch and breath of acetone.

Walls have been torn, by look-aways
Left in the mulch of decay, made stomach
Of swallowed sympathies, saw infants rot
By rites of abandon, sung
With the séance of sîwáng –
Like rattling, rickets of bone.

Where parents are the savage, of spectres
Stalking glass-blades, of gazes
Through abyss of orbits, gorges and gape
Of the rugged fonta
nelle –
The first fruit of famine, displayed
By the famished, of fondle.

Dying room: a place where love and nutrition-starved orphans are left to end their days.
Sîwáng: Chinese word for “death”.