I.

I’ll spend a lifetime wishing
for the death of a dying star—my favourite star—
just for the sake of seeing
the evening sky light up with a different smile;
just for little old callous me, and
just for a little while.

Your presence wrecks me
like a symphony ruins silence;
the plain made whole by the stunning, oh
the stunning, meanwhile, raised from the
ashes of passion and violence.

Oh dear soldier, fighting for the same old
same old, same old thing;
soft colors flush your cheeks,
blooming like lazy flowers in a spring-
time painting, though
not nearly quite as meek.

…

Why was it strange—

the intensity in your palms
with their shrapnel-dented callouses
cupping the head of a loaded pistol—
and did it hurt, then, when you
pulled the trigger
with your other hand’s crooked finger?

I once saw you standing tall,
holding in your heart the very words
whose shapes I wish my tongue could form,
whose vowels I wish my throat could sing,
and in my body’s thundering turmoil, drink in hand, I face
the wall, cloaked in a dusty floral

lit by the lamplight—a soft mimicry
of a certain star’s solar incantations,
dead with a bang and a show
barely six hundred years ago.

II.

Ears, which ring with silent conviction and
a drop of venomous pride and poisonous virtue
from the drem, droplets from the cauldron,
belong to the dead men, walking aimlessly, internally
bleeding from a few thousand bullets of
toxic knowledge
shot from the firearms of
misguided teachers from
the age of long ago.

((interlude))

((why do you make my skin crawl if))

((we are, fundamentally, the same?))

Self destruction, halted by gravity and newton’s law,
often ends in martyrdom.

For instance,

suicide by inability to endure,
suicide by failure to find the cure,
suicide by nonexistent generosity, as in
suicide with the help of a thousand hands,
five hundred of which gave the final push,
the others,
mostly,
unwilling to hold onto the victim’s sleeve—
unwilling to touch a broken soul in need.

They sacrificed for the future
a veil
of smiles
and falsehoods;

a curtain of shadows disguised as silk,
shutters of steel, locked by riddles at each knob,
poured over the bones of the undertaker,

grave-robbing Ophelias and Antique Romans
for the sake of aging romance.

All sacrificed, sacrilegiously, for the future,
lived and left as examples of
what no one
should be made
to feel.

But the ugly cycle, as is the case of
the wheel
of a child’s unicycle,
turns a thousand revolutions before
the child, stricken by boredom, takes her leave.

…sacrificed for the future…
all for nothing, in the end.

III.

The science of sacrifice and self-sabotage
rivals
the melancholy of truth
in collateral (damage):

broken umbrellas made of crow feathers
like naked trees in an autumn hailstorm.



The “politician grannies,” to borrow a phrase, send
their mole
to watch—with those eyes, a saturated yellow,
alarmingly mellow with gleeful cruelty—
as the world is ingested by a black hole.

I feel sick.

Last period I heard of things, hazardous
things that old men tell young men, and
I realized that war is
the result of
old boys with gaunt faces and the apprehensive eyes
of an unforgiving child, without the malleability of mind,
but still as wild,
who croak vicious words for the sake of greed,
and who choke on peace to tame their creed,


little ones then who now shake at us
their fists and canes,


who then carry on that legacy on spines of stone,
the memoirs of the dead and decaying built
on flesh and blood and broken bones,
corpses limping, yellowed and diseased from
an airbourne plague of fear
crowd the streets and alleys
of fallen cities and valleys,
threatening to make it all
disappear.

…

Until then,

We sound the chimes that scream “it’s time,”
a timeless roar which ripples through
the veins of our homeland
and the infrastructure of our bodies;

And at the tail end of our call is a shout,
from every heart to a single voice, a
sharp gun shot ripped viciously from only
one throat,
more felt like a hurricane on bare skin,
for every party has cast its vote:

REVOLUTION,

REVOLUTION,

REVOLUTION,

And in the distance was another cry:

NO(!) IT(’S) (YO)U(,)LOVER(!)

It’s only you
and
your angry, cunning, sisters
and
your gentle, weeping, brothers
and
the bravery and stREngth of your
gendervariant kin and

The Villain’s wOrds, soured by spiteful
breath, that make your head spin,
that make the world spin—

It’s only you and your army
of hand-holding, peace-loving sLUTs and queers and allIes of love

(and our heroes who were spoON fed cultural poison
by their idols and predecessors,
our heroes
who hold the antidote in the
last place they’d expect to find it)—(it’s in the back of their
narrowed minds, where truth is often buried away) and



Only we
can turn the planet on its axis,
because whether the outcome is
new life
or death,
whether we find justice in this realm
or equality in the dust of our rotting, weary, "too sullied flesh,"

This is the end,
and like the aftermath of the star
whose death I wish to see,
like the last haggard, illuminated cry of a supernova,

My friend,

there will be peace.