“I am impetus”

Me choose?
No.
I am choice,
I am impetus and consequence.
When I was a child
I thought I was myself
When I was a child
I thought I was more powerful
Than the world
Though now I know.

I am seaweed in the tide
Of a haunting moon.
And seven devils too

At war and in love
At midnight and on Mondays
We are legion
Mongrel, and knotted flesh
And not superheroes
None rises above
A mutant race
The world
Is supersaturated with souls
And lives spray, drift, crash, shift
And the waves mock the lines
We’ve scratched into our maps
The boundaries
The ink blurs, runs, stains
And the pitched waste roars
We are never ourselves alone
And nothing is untouched
Nor free to be indivisible
But history was always a universal solvent
Before I knew so
I was solute
I am myself a bit
But millions inscribe my soul
The cemeteries are lies
We are the gravestones of our fathers
We are the prisoners
Of a dead moon hanging.

Ghosts of old men’s acquaintances haunt this place
Where I grew up
There is no quarantine here
There is no clean break
Though I cannot see them
I cannot escape
Reverberations of their words
The familiar and weary beams of their houses
The corpses that linger from their mistakes
Made tame, respectable
In tombs
As block letters and boxes of stone
Dull the smell
Of the unchangeable
But time and death do even better
Unasked and generous
To bury
The cold hearts
Of the architects

Birth was a plummet
A push off precipace
Birth is sentence
I am choice
I have my choices too
They are improvisation
Sometimes
No. Often
Desperation
Often relent
To that dead moon
Relent
To the seven devils
I take what my hands find
I was dumpster diving
I disappeared in my own mind
I was left a shell
In the storm we lost
The north star
In the fire we lost
Our humble moss
We were young heroes
In simple uniforms
In the trenches we lost
Our dragons
To mustard gas
And our maidens
To ourselves
And ourselves, we lost too.

O, Oregon trail
Well-worn
To new places we set out
But we were old
And we are old
Our fathers birthed us
Of blood and steel and hunger
And we live in ruts
Deeper than our dreams
When the rains come
Over this place
Will we have the strength
To slip through the foul mud
To some higher ground?
I said when
But the rains are falling now
Streaking across the sky
And I am tomorrow’s phantom
I am a link in the chain
The unseen influence
And one day
I will have crystallized completely
And become another statue
On the lunar plane
Or perhaps in some crater
And of the great shifting of the sea
One millimeter will be mine.

Our choices are prisons
And action conceives impossibility
The past is sharp diamond
Though less transparent
And every moment
We hurtle out over edges
And are all falling.

I am impetus by Kyle B. Broeckel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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