5 April 2024
25 June 2024

totum simul

the appalling, preposterous naivety
of arms manufacturers and

the constellations of actors beholden to them
always beholden, emboldened

with a place in this world that a bomb
or a bullet calls a graph

or a dollar with purely negative function
so what happens in Myanmar

or any civilised high school / home office
garage / in a crypt even vegans print weapons

to their bodies’ content
print? what sort of book is that?

how do you read it as it appears in your head
or your heart? and as for God, for seventy years

I asked the wrong answers and perjured myself
in obscurantism, I told lies

occult non sequitur nonsense about life
the universe and so on

until my legs were dumb with peripheral
anxiety the fear of numbness, the loss of

eloquence to go solar, to outrageously
outrun the imperium, this present death

increasingly accelerates the current
of my future, outruns my blighted life

and hooray for time, I rush toward death
as to my beginning because I’m the same

contingent skin warmed by sun cooled
by sea, cut by knife, smudged by life