puncture — things longer than a paragraph
still need be said.

call beauty, call to death & dying.

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

Sallow-skin stinking & felled as old dead-wood. lost for losing & cleaved of will to fight, now spent—you’d best to lay there till everything runs calm and blood colors nothing no more red and wanted. You ain’t enough to win. This fight comes more headed than the junction of wire keepin’ you bound. More knotted than the spine of a young lover twisting to you, away.

Cull need & fire, want & all childless hope. Put a hand, quick now, to sharper edges of what mind you still got & peel a layer of your awful stinking skin back. Winnow no more we. winnow no more us. life’ll sure cut back all unwanted growth, gangly and beset as it wants by horrible complex thread, and threat of beauty. You need’nt worry for nothing will be left hanging, or loose, or free standing when it’s fed into the fear’d-mouths of all those wrecked n wretched tiny-hearts. Nothing can survive the vacuum created when love lets out of them. Winnow no more us. winnow no more we.

Remember then, soonday you’ll be dirt & bone & gnarly joints almost forgotten & wailed—that tired old lover’s heart will’ve given up beating. complete quiet come over rivers of blood hereto eternal, no more wars—what was certain impossible is finally revealed impossible, the rock rolled down, settled. stilled.

Remember now, what was one, was more. still-born & birthed by hips thrashed & thrashing with living-breathing need. Once dead flesh lived against night & promised anything could come of just having it.

your tiny life is a finger tracing circles upon a fattened belly. In turns joy and absence. In turns all and utter nothingness. You’ll wait for the arc to lean toward the full, then burst & come a torrent of silent, weeping, aloneness.

You’ll give over these things you carry.  These listless crafts you misspent fine hours crafting. Trinkets of a vapid & common mind collected earnestly. You’ll give over the lies n fears. The broken hopes & mysteries. You’ll give them over & long dig intricate trenches full with arms & hipbones of all you couldn’t carry with you. You’ll bury up fallen will & fit-failed aspirations to have your heart beat speeding against the dead, or dying then cast off need of a meaningless division between your own self & all the things made you and begin craft anew.