He has nowhere to fall dead, they say.
What does the landscape matter once one dies? Azaleas or cobblestones, it's the same. Let's find a place to fall alive. Where life is so strong that not even the blow of death has a place.
A place to fall laughing.
Half alive, half dead.
The rain passed, the dead leaves, the storm.
It left on the earth the atrocious scent
of a puddle of war, water wherever you look,
water and nothing else. Without sunlight, a but was born in the water:
from there, weeds, a few small fish, the shielded edge of
a convalescing rainbow. Thus—think the people who
make their shacks in the soul—thus,
exactly thus, buts grow on oblivion.
And from the puddle is born a burning memory of cities,
and a pair of wandering names that set fire
to its path.