III: Blood Song

Words are guerrillas that lay images like mines
blasting the sight from light-accustomed eyes
and, eviscerating truth, leave truth
truly bleeding where truth lies.

In the mountain valleys
pressed down by business and the city
swaddled still in life's damp heat,
I look up puzzled, unborn,
to the mountain peak
and wonder at death's cooling shroud of snow.
I can only write what comes.
I can't write what I know.
When I get freedom I shall be a boy
trapped beneath his mother's corpse
whose memory spilled with her blood.
I'll call myself a self-made man
and think the black vast past empty
and good.

I shall be the hero of the sanguine mien
and stare unmoved from photographs
made by a pointillist machine.
I shall be nothing. I shall be free.
I shall be loved. I shall be seen.

I don't write what I want.
I write what comes.
And in the dark, helpless limpness of my bed,
I will have guns.

U+1F665