the way we live now ::

when the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding

plague across vast acres of the land, choking schools

and churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding

virile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools

fear to tread in their wake :: when all known tools

of resistance are clutched in the hands of the vile

like a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots, while

the disempowered slice smiles across their own faces

and hide the wet knives in writhing thickets of hair

for future use :: when breathing in the ashen traces

of dreams deferred, the detonator’s ticking a queer

echo that amplifies instead of fading :: when there-

you-are is where-you-were and the sunset groans

into the atlantic, setting blue fire to dark white bones.