Swarm

I swerved into the negative.
In curved words
That collapsed like the soft sides of architecture.

Everything you see here is pumped through
A tube and on the other side of the tube: history

With a big H that stands for: hardens in place,
That stands for without hands.

You’d think that it was late at night
When I arrived but it wasn’t.
It was all white.

It tasted the way a body tastes
When it wants love.

No one there told stories
To anyone else. Nothing was a fiction.
A girl mouthed
Language into the stone ear of another girl.

That’s what they called give and take.

There were forms
And they moved. Somehow the way insects

Move into fallen logs.

Once a day, they became
Jubilant but then

They went back into their holes.


1. We call life a forest when it looks pretty.
2. We call fiction poetry when it seems to rise out of itself.