Swing That Mallet from the Hip, Young Man, If You Hope To Split the Stone

We have made small sounds
close to the ground here,
the scraping of a foot, the
noise of our breathing, the
wind of dreams leaving
us through porous skin,
the dying echo of a dragging
chain upon the earth, the
scrape of stone moving
against other stone in
this husk of a palace we
built and let fallow for
all these eons.

Now covered with snow,
fallen from a sky Spring
chose to absolve of its sun,
these stones, this cracking
mortar, this remnant of
a thing we have forced
ourselves to forget,

It is a dark and inky stain,
burned further by the chosen
chemicals we have cleaved
to our flesh, etched into us
as acid falling to earth in
white slowly etches into
cracks of the broken
stonework of yesterday’s
bombed-out husk.

And we are reminded,
like those who awaken
clutching a note from
some former self, a thing
of great importance, but
written in a wraith-like
scrawl, illegible and
sweat through, no good
for anything better than
a haunting, and these
unrecieved messages
from ourselves gnaw at
us as we dig through
this wreckage, turning
over these musty
stones, our boots, so
worn at the heel,
dragging through
the wet abundance of
late-fallen snow, our
hands red at the knuckle,
our eyes swimming to
blank.