They always tell you
quiet rivers run deep
drowning is the most pleasant
way to go. Flicker
ing. Isness. A way to be. Isms.
Until you do all nine lives.
They always tell you
quiet rivers run deep
drowning is the most pleasant
way to go. Flicker
ing. Isness. A way to be. Isms.
Until you do all nine lives.
Stitched together with two inch pipe.
Scaffolds welded with skin.
A tooth here, a loose finger there.
Steerage pressure fit
with glimmering coils of hair.
Saliva to grease the switch panel's buttons.
Depress, spring up, with a snap, the familiar
clap of the shatterproof caps, protect
the finger nail toggles touched closed.
The grates and walls pitted and torn and replaced.
A prize toe trophy for a pressure failed hole,
to keep the air in, taped in place with a
carved and aged sole. Remember
the boarding party from five years ago?
The pirates and bounty hunter's muzzle glows?
The interdictors, the uniformed, the cloned,
and metal mated? What memories. What loves.
Alive with their blood.
Adrift, it is time to depart. The outer rim home
to ice worlds and its blinking quiet eye,
a tear in time, a channel glitched tone,
it is time to depart for the further reaches yards
and make everlasting alloys
from what has grown.