in the palace of poisoned sunlight

these are all nothing more than

small stories without endings
and we are all something less than
we fist appear

and there are worse truths than

christ bleeding to death and
there is nothing more important than love

there is the world you know

and then the one that actually exists

the rape camps and the amputee camps and

even your idea of democracy
which will always be connected to wealth

my apologies

which are always born from fear

which begin to taste like ashes in these

first brutal days of January

this letter from a friend who says I've

run out of things to say
and the fact that i know he's right

the way anger becomes a

reflex and then a memory

is replaced by indifference even as orphans

crawl from burning churches only to be
machine-gunned by soldiers

even as priests force young boys

to their knees in curtained rooms

words spilling from their bitter lips like

so much bloodstained poetry