Literature
Simple Machines
there is no green valley, stitched
in-between the skull plates
of a death like this,
nothing to section its low spots
into a geography
more sensical, less cruel
or intricately interleaved enough
to dismiss as random or miraculous,
there is simply no vein of life
to stretch or shape these steps
into lesson
when imaginations die,
they settle and house their need
in places like this,
in the oil-dusty shed quiet
landscape of out-buildings,
they settle like workpieces
clamped to the point of crush,
between jaws of the vice, where
their own empty arms meet and remember
how the unwavering compression
of failure's suffocation
can almost feel like lo