One-Leg, One-Eye I -  Where We Were Was Before Life

(Poem)

One leg we went on

Not walking, albeit we moved.

Flamingo-tilt, heron-hold, 

Not upright,

upheld…in histories not yet told.

A scaffold of string, a mercy of bone, bargain struck between falling                                     and staying,

barely arranged.

One leg kept time,

the other the politics of that time.

***

Provisional skeletons we were, ribs bargaining

with ribs.

knees on temporary contracts,                  

Already half-ghost.

Already half-after.

living in the tense where life is postponed.

***

Everywhere we went we leaned.

into chant, into curb-breath, leaned 

into the space,

missing the step, we thought we were missing.

No longer wanting to look after

                   What was never told

It wasn’t fall we were in

albeit we fell forward.

***

Standing was not us

with us…

we were assembled in standing.

Postponement

was what our posture was made of.

One leg as what was,

No leg as what comes,

One eye as what’s left

***

Before falling, said it was their law

not to be mourning the sun we never saw

                   Dark shadows, meant to be all we knew of that light

Soon to be void…No dark, no light.

***

Their teeth, chewed the collapse no one wanted to agree

tasted sour, oxidation on the bronze, 

grievous…the figured torsos of hero-made machines.

herein the international law of crash

the internal law of palpitations

the officialities we were trapped in, 

here in, there out.

As these were just. The abstract laws we ought to be understood with,

In and out.

Long tables, stretched as far as the eye wandered

They were eating furiously, eyeballs caviar for the state, 

blood buffet for the west

post-meal burp, we heard.

***

Pity objects we were, no one said how long.

Collected or owned, 

The sun we saw only on the shelf of the owner

in the room we thought we shared.

objects they wanted, tangibles that could be filed.

  we kept moving…

***

In. After the body before;

What kept it moving, was shot to be stopped

Out. After The body after.

Body as evidence, corpse as violence

as if being dead were the entrance fee to life.

Not enough the half-after life we were left to be

Heard, only wet in death bath.

Sound is to be stopped so the sound could be named

Real is this voice, if only in archive.

***

We were moving like the already-dead.

disqualified from life, ghostly ghost-like

Later the eye thinned. 

no leg, almost-leg, no eye, there is no sight

no eye went with us                         

not seeing…

an enforced elsewhere of sight

We saw with skin we saw, sound moving

us in the core we saw,

leg was memory of weight.

We were hip and tilt, tilt and drift,

                                drift and almost-body…

We were no-body, not even the soul.

We were what was never told, we perished as we raised.

No subject, nor even object

We were what they always failed to feel 

we kept moving…

***

Where we were was before life, even while

we were alive. Where we were, life had not yet

been approved.

Where we were, we were alive too early… in the wrong tense. Where we were the political failed to see.

Only what no longer moves.

It kept happening, was where we were all that time. 

We were not there.

We were the moving before-there. We were the living

they only meet once it is too late to stop.

Redistributed we were, 

leaned to another measure.

What becomes, is how we move the in and out to upside-down. 

Seeing skin,

walking sound, the proliferations of how we 

are to be found…