❝ cut ❞

[litany]

Light: the knife in the dark and the secrets it kept,
slatted half shadowed and learning how waiting
could mean something different depending always
on where you were standing. Light kicked back from
the moon and her territories, moonrise, moonset, all
coming together on the horizon like a word endlessly
sought and seldom found. Want to tell you just the
good parts, the parts that mean we're whole and solvent
from heart to harm. Want to tell you how it ends, how
we make it. How I stuck around after all. Want to tell
you I know honesty now, the shape and taste curling
under the tongue and how it's paradise; how it's poison
only because I'm allergic. I explain myself away,
desperate to disappear but it doesn't work; it never works
when you want it to. Isn't that right. Light in the dark,
even with the exits all shut and the electricity abandoned.
Ugly moon pale and falling into places she doesn't belong,
moon whose name abstains from written history but
settles the way some names do:
hands on the piano broken some years ago
hands around my throat, hands that were my own hands
hands controlled underneath by other versions of "I"
shadowing and shaking for reasons
I can never seem to remember.
But I remember you. The moon. And
the things you saw in it
until you couldn't see anymore.
Want to tell you I sleep over your deadness
looking for life. But maybe
you already know.