we stand in huddled masses
hunkered against the driving snows
dreaming ourselves sheltered

but in actuality waiting
with dumbfounded appetency
for the poleax

ineluctable slaughter
a slow march toward relief
away from this frozen bastion

ululating into the indifferent sky
their ears deaf to our hearts’ beating
the clouds encroach with malice

they've stacked our bones high
as kindling into towering bulwarks
all in the name of progress

and these shorn, trampled forests
have become a nidus of their iniquity
somehow all of this became accepted

abiding of this prefatory miasma
dim views of birds falling
and gray ash, susurrous

floating through the whipping grasses
all the beasts lying down
their tongues lolling

they have terminably broken its back

all these lowly beasts
of your flowered heart
drag you off
into and through
those fields on fire

you’ve cut the heads off
your tin foil gods
cut their hearts out too

you are lost and you have lost
Acheron boils over and
your hand looks almost real
in the glint of a traced arc

you shudder in the sudden rain
you are out of time
without time
the willows have begun to weep

this excrescence suffocates all hope
your heart starts to bleed
in this wretched light

try not to
yowl into the sleepless
sundered night
with these visions
of annihilation and other
things such as this way come

there will be times

where it will be
your flesh and bone

tendon and sinew

against steel
and momentum

carbide and pneumatic pressure

and you will not win
you will not come out whole

but with just enough wherewithal

to know what it was
that has been stripped from you

you will be shown how deep

your strength of will actually goes
how to don you’re bravest face

against the inequity and
trickery of your own mind

and you’ll be shown

a more nuanced definition
of resolve

you will know what it means to ache

with the desire for surrender
and what it means to

deny yourself that too