Don’t even know your power over me,
I prayed to transmute this agony, hope
you’re not feeling shards of my stress as they
fall and fly from me like sparks, enmity
so often turns to friendship, they say, if
only the truth of ancient wisdom were
as known today, then we would move beyond
this through an understanding transcending

language & politics, cultivate perhaps
a new tradition whose initiates
need no mystery to conceal what is
felt & revealed so openly by stronger
men, more confident & better at being
themselves than we are, those fathers haunting
us, chilling blushes of breath reddening
our flesh as their bruises descend on us,

going down enflames the skull’s crystal bowl
more than dawn, fills the soul’s hole if only
for a moment, holds off the shattering
fall, gives me something to lose knowing full
well I never ever even had him
at all, that answer for his absence I
once so desperately attempted and
failed miserably at wanting to make

you be, just by being with me shadows
seemed suddenly to sound like two wolves, one
black and the other white, ravenous beasts
traversing hard this harsh wilderness wedged
deep between these two darkest hearts, rabid,
distressed, and devious united by
appetite, shouting at the same echo,
devils hounding each other out of spite.