Kingdom come
slowly.
The march of dimes
to fountains.
Apartheid, apartheid!
Modernity! Apartheid!
History, vainglorious and
oh so
one night standing
fantasmaglorious.
There were names for these.
Names incisive. Names
provocative in the way
interpolation
could only be.
We were gods. We were
gods with no ambition and
lackadaisical in our votive.
Perhaps soured
in our thinness,
our absence of motive,
but we open up our wrists
to see if we exist and
the question hangs,
is this our empire,
is this the swan
and the lake
and the ugly duckling's take
or is this the profundity,
the profundity of becoming,
the hours and seconds after
some kind of tone deaf detonation
demarcated by camera lens and
cloud burst veins.
The empire,
hard won. Lives lost and for
what?
The empire. The empire.
The culmination of years
spent in gestation and towering,
dreaming of its own
dismemberment as it breaths.
Dreaming of
its own dismemberment
as it seethes. Reconnitered and
in the bed of sight
unrecognized?
So you open up your fist
to see if, in its own flight,
the you unbound,
can still persist.
