The Echo Devours the Echo

We rode chariots, mud, blood, and shit in a steady plume,
lay on rafts, floating our bones toward freedom or toothy reefs,
lost ourselves in a desperate evening, cloistered before the bonfire,
yearning for the smooth fur of dusk as the woods go black.

A cancer rose and we put it down; another rose, we scrubbed the corpses.
We took to the air and ate through the earth, though never
like bird or worm, always standing beside the thing,
a thick-fingered ideogram, a postulate scribbled on an inverted lens.

Those reeds in the water, the mind that watches them, undulating,
the squirm of the tongue as a not-quite-ripe berry bursts under teeth—
we are a brilliant, blistered crew, full of knots, bliss, and murder,
and if we are alone in the universe, I die a broken man.


—Marc Pietrzykowski