Williams April 27th

Painted Bomb

This disassembled sketch

of your sickness dream: me

in crowbar regalia, your horsefly

regatta & the space between

our bones. We marauder our

worries on the paper, charcoal

& crucifix, grief crucible.

Call it a mural. Call it an illicit

marking on the back of our skulls,

a weeping lesion. A legion prepared

to devil our insides, trick our cartilage

to turn against itself. The wisest among

us know that paper dissolves in any hard

rain. We know that an echo is always

preceded by a noise, a hostage gurgle,

a troop of black statistics.

Williams April 26th

Brute Calligraphy

My sluggish lifeline dogcarts my hand, traces

the ink spreading across my palm. The oracle

measures the debacle, writes an open

letter to the scimitar pharmacies. We are sick

of your barren & listless caches, your sleepwalker

phenomenons. The sun falls & we assemble

our battalion of cadavers, our platoons of ligaments

& cadence, bronze medalists & found battleships.

Our desolate army with our steady diet of wormbread

& fermentation, we mongrel through the mud, look at

the scars fevering through our hands. We arrive at your holy

sites, prepared to plunder & pillage. Our arrival has been spelled

out in the ravaged cloth spun around our shoulders, spun

right down into the snow & the dirt. The tattered flags attached

to your outpost won’t the story. We won’t leave any mouths to seed

the soil, no soil to seed the sky.