God, we don’t like to complain –

   We know that the mine is no lark –

But – there’s the pools from the rain:

   But – there’s the cold and the dark.

from Caliban in the Coal Mines by Louis Untermeyer


prospero, you are no hero

: with your books, your are

just a shakespearean weirdo
your tomes

entomb

sun

& moon

leaving only the distance

equations make, filling

	             up the gloom
with nothing to unlock but

this brutal rock

we mine		              find

			              time

	             & frack it all up
there are no complaints

, only poems that never

open up or give homer

to epic a canon’s restraint
prospero, you are zero

, the infinite absence of

nothing becoming no

thing at all: how you speak

		                , hollow
for the fire

you gave us

		           spark
for the song

you gave us

	    	           lark
for the fear

we have only

		           dark
! hark, we are caliban

: in advent plan, chart

star positions above

us, above all of this
! we are only human

& even the daughters

you shipwrecked you

can’t protect from eden
breath us complete from mud beneath

your feet: we will lilith the length of

this abyss, hiss all vinegar & piss like

this hatespeak wish oppressed sheep

			                calling out from be

			                -neath a bridges &

			                updates we like, like

	     		                , cher, or retrait
? hast thou not dropped from heaven

, as all quantum leviathans should when

their importance weighs less than myth

, or superstition, a behemoth we cannot

believe in: that is what you look like in

the absence of all your books
all the infections that the sun sucks up

welt across your churches as a mono

-poly that hurt history, a feast of biblical

beasts to pew as you undo the sacred

& holy too		            us usurpers

care not for the iscariot because forty

pieces of silver won’t deliver messiahs

to a proverbial bonfire: we’re having a

book-burning down here, shakespeare 
your miranda rights died when your

daughter did: spell resurrection again
	      from the coal-mines we canary time

	      , yellow & laughing: we’ve spoken
babel, enable a cloud

table so beneath pros

-pero’s soles we’ll

dine on all the lines

we’ve been told: in

an attempt to keep

us confused, he’ll

write menus in di

-alects so old we

have to exhume

historians who

croon ancient

tunes, even

though we

-‘ve no wo

-rds 4 w

-hat we

want

2		            order
from beneath the ground we have

	     found fuselage that fossils fuel

, debating which came first: pros

	     -pero thirst to animate the inanimate

or a propulsion explosion of all life

		              out to live: from beneath crust

, emerge to dust (we still don’t know

				                       which is worse…
but still we dig

, knowing the

dirt has answer

(to give, witch

…, or perhaps

– secretly – we

hope the core

can be broke

, & back in

-to the cos

-mos we

						                       float