Dream Song #16

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals

they had programmed and there are blows in life so

powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches

and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the

sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies

and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we

had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we

felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming

through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they

would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our

mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re

dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths

were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J

and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J

and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were

hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving

into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy