Words Are Things

I am haunted by the death of things,
their heaviness, texture, inertia,
the muffled weeping of old shoes in the closet . . .

And words, too, are things,
after the illusion,
words that hide behind clothes and names,
and bleed, suffer and are crucified
in dictionaries.

And what if, after all,
death itself is not eternal,
but embodied in the lust of stones
and the dust rolled beneath our fingernails,
baptized in tears of hornets,
and all hope of resurrection
swaying gently
on a pile of shattered eyeglasses?

Merciless geometry!

Heartlessness in the depths of forms!

I think God is a poem
like Auschwitz,
aesthetic, unified, cold,
the work death made free,
His masterpiece
strung with sinews of barbed irony
and the obscenity of gleaming prosthetics.

-- Sean Lause