12 January 2010 | Vol. 9, No. 4

Knuckled Under

by MARK DECARTERET

We will chalk out where

your heart balked forever,

mangled into some kind

of a horseshoe, lucked

over for the very last time—

once all appetite and charm,

now the start of a parenthetical

rejoinder, a pillow-muffled alarm.

With my fingernail I will scrape

at the pavement for tips—

meaning clipped from the past

so it can be rerun with other spins,

spit shined into treasuries

of light. I am more ghost

than most of those who've gone on,

fluttering over the scene,

a butterfly danced by the wind

all that's keeping me sentenced,

a float for a mock holiday

where the dead line the street

like bugs on a sticky strip

hanging down from the sky.

Why in death would you take

your life any more serious,

suddenly field our concerns?

Still I've shipped out some words,

my own heart's appeal coddled into clichés,

its banality magnified, fly-eyed

from out its layers of bubble wrap.

Oh, what little of you I'll have awoken.

Rather a moth that spoke out in tongue,

of a god it knows only by taste.

A flame that you too had encouraged

locating a place behind your back

with fingers cramped into a cross.