Feeling Fable
                                    -after

"…whereof a little / More than a little is by much too much."

There were once people who carried tiny moonlit icebergs in their lungs,

the floating. They could sing northern darkness. Then, silence like a mass

grave got bigger but they didn't dig there. They shoveled & shoveled

the horizon, shoveled past the blue to get down to the red name tag tied to

Death's big toe. Longing was too many wings and not enough air. It is not

always a relief to be a child. Some are forced to conceal grenade pins in

their hair. Some are made large, forced to be their own parents, each lie

like a baby tooth falling out of their heads to be slowly replaced, each peg

pushing up & up through the gum loam. Because eating was feeling, not eating,

feeling, & God, the fleshless expert between them, whose laugh could not be

distinguished from a cry down here, gave no sign, every sign. So,

disappointment like 50 bowtied moths gathered over your face in a funeral

grey. The body that began, now aches & aches & earns its next leaf boat,

its next probability, your sweet son pissing into the rose bush in the middle

of your fear, your sentence, his kidneys spilling blood, tiny red ants clinging,

climbing the ice of these ribs in the smelt middle of the night's middle warrant. 

Who you are means nothing when archive libraries are burning down inside you.