Ickerrbak

The dart sled roses grew in dusted fire bended 'neath the forest floor at the foot of that great orchard / inside the softened sphere of lighting the flames took swift a cause crackling in posture spoke relation / brethren of our waving hands and rising cheeks sinching redder with the overture of another apple heart / sopping seeds and stars we carved / a steel blade runs the length of thumbs to a nail, string known and hips informed / if only these were mine / if only I was yours to own / we might spend the stone and agitate / acoustically in languages that only you could know / you taught the serpents symmetry / the snow / starving hares we parented barbwired through the throat / beat tread paths that danced like we do in the fire out of necessity / or to turn our nerve ends outwardly / we were oaks with upturned roots that lead us leave wherever we may go / and wherever the sky boats tow / there we will follow into a night crossed as canvas hatches / the bridges of branches wet as staved matches light up our way and point us to day with windows that glow and gates open latches

torches / there / north star / bare

spade nose upwardly gingerly we follow

for the wretches of clouds reflect the trenches of sounds / glinting as the leper shard mouths stapled in a lax style bound / accustom to corn rows gold leaf textured as kief coarse as the wool of a hound / the hides we bleed ground south from the poles cadavers under ice

heart beats melt the sleet the sheets of still polaroid snow

through a thin layer of frozen water

uneven with the skins palpitations

the hazel flecks of an iris skew in ellipses

reminiscent of the seed of the apple of your dissected eye

cut lengthways we embodied the shape of stars to come

on lesser days we were glancing sideways

and mistook the slipping blade for the rising of the sun

the symmetry of freezing rain evens out our pores

and we appear younger in the white out than we ever have before

when our shadows spread long enough to bend up
across and over the white wash picket fence...
when our shadows spread long enough to bend up
across and over the yellow as squash aging dog with no chance...
when our shadows spread long enough to bend up
across and over the worn through walls and roof of the home we built
but who's life over the last decade had been tested and spent...
it was in these hours that we allowed our powdered forms a seasonal step from threshold up across the caking dust plain stretched between the whispers we panned from goldmine to one another at the bottom of warm baths lips locked with a feverty exclaiming the length of canvas over planks we carved and set together we'd cross from cushioned caves and screen doors in a tone wavering as cellophane the traceless scar skims the hairline of your face / eyes accept the dust like lakes the dry heat and particles freckled our skin in circles / boney chests to perspiring nape / shoulders that bronzed the summits sun summoned our brooding mouths dictation from tractor chakra to cow tongue cuticle into yoga positions reminiscent of kung-fu studied widthways / the only difference is that, on today / conjoining the curvature of shadow our lips bent occular in an awkward attempt to rise in the heat of whats best for our souls and our nest to sew what is left so that they in later years in an hour not unlike todays can hold their swollen jaws high and in contest with a smile at rest and stand a chance at the shades judging stance we cast on a mushroom patch that we had nicknamed hollow
for that was the orchard where we learnt how to swallow ramifications and give way to a freedom our joints thirsted for on the dust plains a process of the combining of our marrow
for that was the orchard where we learnt how to swallow
and when we fed it was always the notions of an animals dying child
we are so sorry for the pain we've caused you
we just mistook these vestiges for bile //
we stood above the infants barefooted on shallow graves as we watched the bodies stave and swell / twitch infectiously as if they were the tunnels and home ways of something larger than the space that contains it / as if it were less when visible / wanting to disappear so that it/me/you/we/us could again be as it should / so that together we could finally be whole

and I know

\ I now know /
there are some bodies that never let go of their soul