Monday, February 8, 2010

What Dwells Inside the Rot (by JMA)

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1 comment:

  1. QAvePressMarch 3, 2010 at 1:39 PM

    The Crimes of Fallen Apples

    Let them weep for themselves on the frozen ground.
    They have fallen and are afraid of their shadows,
    of the color they will lose when the cold dissipates.

    Some move a bit north, but they're apples
    and they don't have legs. They're fruit, and live
    for no such thing as escaping. Unless sinking

    is an escape. Unless hissing and collapsing into rot
    is an escape. Our skin is a memory of dirt
    and wants the dirt's company.Or to move closer

    to the sound falling makes. If you can hear the snow
    sitting on the ground, you can hear the thoughts of apples.
    Discarded apples surprised by their luck, coming back

    outside, like prisoners finally, at the end of their life, set free,
    told, Go. You have served your sentence. And in those years
    in dark, confined space, dreaming of light, of air across

    their sour brows, they've forgotten how to move a few steps
    beyond their confinement, as if a wall were an ocean
    and they don't know how to swim, and don't know how to try

    or how to want to learn something new. They stand
    like they did at the end of dreams of flight. They are
    not running, but exhaustion inflates their failing skin

    that conceals the rot beneath. On this frozen ground
    there's no stink yet. So they can linger a little longer.
    Until the sun comes out and someone will move them

    into the thick brush at the edge of the forest, or cover
    them. Until then, listen to the shapes their shoulders
    make, the expand and collapse, their life, which has

    become their waiting and forgetting is a crime
    greater than any they committed. It is a crime
    of the living. That guilt follows us into the grave.

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