BALLAD II 

  We kids thought mere death
could brought us towards hell—
a cauldron of touch 
wetnursing the flesh into 
bordering a death we thought 
was momentous

transportation 
 a VanGO for too far became 
something resembling
a fetish psychopomp
  yet all our pasts  
buried themselves 
right  
  there—
there a row of bodies  
 lined shoulder to hip  
 like we squeezed  
 in one car 
  we thought this death was hell
something beyond 
mundanity 
we laid lost in the underneath before 
but our feet still touched  
 the earth— 

crust we could not break  
 though we tried
our nails  
  pushing up from plyers of dirt
  the grasshid rattlesnake 
 listening 
 only to our digging song 
 —someone sang we forget
  sweetness Nat said we
  forgot sweetness  

We forgot to hear the 
 horns  
 shake the air. each little 
undulation punching back
until we started sounding like  
violence— 
 erasing these feet of crust 
hands of hands  
 cried out for each other 
animal we lost 
a single body now became our  
core 
 a shelter to reason listening  
 to lights of song —bidescendance  
 building wider pits wider  

 wider nasty  
 needle playing our piles 
 like record reverberations 
each groove 
in our flesh becoming echo 
 a speaker  
 facing  
 towards their prone figures  
 feeding only  
its Ouroboros self 
 
—someone new said we sounds like  
 resounding a shade  
 voice 
 haunted waves wrapped our 
 lingering fragments
  an eye from one shoulder 
a memory of hair from another’s
  ear the  
 flaxseed— 
a percocet of the truth 

 yet all we saw was 
crab players  
 performing  
orchestra