for ineptshieldmaid

a list of petty guilts

Knowing that the moment you call in sick
your headache will start to fade,
but doing it anyway;

setting down an article as soon as it discomforts you,
lacking the motivation required
to challenge yourself;

and lying to the television screen
that you would have the guts to confess your love,
no matter what.




The first of -- hopefully! -- many. If you want to leave me poetry prompts, the post is still there.

for Ji :)

homily

morning in the principality sees
the slow ticktock of those whose rhythms fall
by chemicals not clockwork,
minds pushing towards their own peak and
chasing Pipe dreams in the grey morning air.
dreams of our sort only:
the waking images pieced together
and projected onto nothing.
no act of sabotage, no guns
no speech no written law will force
the true dead dreaming into our heads.
the morning is a symbol. the morning --
is an arbitrary birth
for those who wake from nothing, or never.
our cogwheel hypnagogia lie parallel
to their gradual climb upwards into noonday smarts.

no place now for every god
who daily sang the sun into the sky,
and fewer candles every week
are lit by feebler hands than mine.
the larger picture (projected -- where?) suggests that this
was never my purpose; it was always yours.
the fires set alight in minds and
what we might call hearts
are of your devising, you who named me
something new
so all of me became the voice
telling gossamer tales of equity
to loop around their necks;
to draw them tight and willing
into the blazing dawn that they found in your face.

morning in the new world of ideas means
ownership of nobody by nobody,
your dream ambition called into being
by many voices all at once;
mine being the careful sound of history,
the record of your own desire.
but we are built on factory lines
and in this image was I made,
created unequal and infused with the spirit
of a searching need,
a fullness of existence that requires
an ownership of shining sorts;
never mine and always yours.

though given a biology to call my own
(I project, the image, the waking construction)
I might be in need of an afterlife;
might hold myself beloved of a God,
a faith full manifest and blind
and breathing through the work of my two hands.
my body would possess
all glorious redundancies
and in my dumbfound dreams the dust
would smother all our gears,
leaving only what remains when the clocks are stopped,
the faint grey mourning of the souls
we do not possess.