* * *
What whispering snowfall,
silent storm,
you carried in your heart, your mind, your hand --
and with no movement I could see,
assassinated both my hope
and my complacency: two brown birds,
one stone.
I walked up to the man that would
rob me of my borders, my security
and gunned down all polite avoidance
of any real feeling,
extinguishing the last remaining reparations
the world was paying us
in subsidies and powerful alliances:
a mortgage
on the hatred it would rather keep than face.
Immediately, we find
the victim's fingerprints
are on the gun, disclosing
the crime, the foolishness,
or the intelligence of suicide:
since it is I that have ended me.
It's over.
It is so over,
and it has been over for a very long time.
Which is why I say it was
euthanasia he committed.
We've been on life-support.
The tubes and the tape,
the institutions and the experts
have transformed a vigorous desire intoa frozen yearning,
a bed-bruised Emblem,
a way of life
to save us from the work of defining ourselves.
Truth moved on long ago,
slipping here and there into a psalm, a dream,
or a solitary, sunlit morning,
while we assassinate each other daily
in the name of survival,
in the name of keeping a thing alive.
We are at a crossroads, you and I.
Over there, the moss grows on a fallen log.
Over there, new parables wait to be dreamt by us.
Over there, the solitary, sunlit names are dawning:
a new name every day.
* * *