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Pitting

Gather round and pay attention to your ticking body!

A wound, we turn inwards; what presence stares back?



Fossils churn under dirty fingernails

And pick at my body quarry;

A natural archaeologist of my own pathology.


We uncover lost worlds

I buried here

In the heart of my jungle, my darkness, my fallibility.


Granite tales of tears

Come flooding

From the rockface –

Once carried in monumental vessels

Appear like cracks and vulnerable veins.


Not the worst I had personally felt

But perhaps the most I have…


And the years dedicated to discovering

Why.


Always watching it disappear beneath the grit.


Ancient stories circulate in bloodstreams

To rise some deadened language

Whereupon forgiveness chokes

And concludes nothing much.


Forget crying.

It’s okay to regret.


It says, smiling and salty

Rearranging its framework –

A crooked skeleton

Dredged from the dirt

Collapsing at the shoulders

And the ochre pelvic bone.


How long we have both been waiting.

A hardened hatred that dried the riverbed

Conspired with the burdensome secrets of

Others.

What knife did slice my skin and lungs?

What drug dissolved in my open drink?

What warehouse was I kept prisoner?

What silence did religion not sweep?


Too long has patience let germinate.

If blessed is the fruit of thy womb

Then show me the shoots of this tumulus.


I pacify! I pacify.


Your loss was mine to know also

At this consecrated ground full of holes

Nuzzled by the bullets of pitiless realities

I relinquish now

My ceremony of ancestral karma

Bows out to a finish

As the subterranean waters

Did nourish the hatchling of my medulla.



🎨/📷 by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Souma no Furudairi (相馬の古内裏) aka Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, c.1844



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