Where I am: in the far black of the cave
of my self, in the dark that was never lit,
which is to say nowhere, among the unwritten,
the agrapha, who live in the mountains
and pay no taxes and therefore do not exist.
My life an alphabet of edges,
smoke around a taper, my eyes are not good,
only a vague ache now where I used to be.
I’ve hung out in the empty spaces between lives,
through slow winter dusks, decade by decade
through seasons of nothing but patience patience,
in the nowhere wherein I imagined nothing.
And went mad with the thought of it.
God knows there’s not much of me,
light enough to be someone, anyone by,
peering into a name Brother Scratchwood, for instance.
Who waits the way iron waits, and the stars,
the way flame sleeps in the wax, the cast
in the dice, mumbling my interminable prayers,
kyrie eleisons to my own wayward heartbeat.
Night after night, all night long,
my arse crossed on the misericorde’s edge,
where Moses crossing the Red Sea sniffs
the wind of thin farts come of piety’s porridge.
And that’s all there is of me, stoney hours
left and right of me my brothers on our knees
calling à cappela in the empire of the dark
crowding to one candle’s flame. Amen.