Silicate Assimilation

The sky unspools a bruise above the street And rain descends, not water, but a theft It drinks the ghost of all our summer heat Until there’s only cold and hollow left. The pavement breathes a thick, copper sigh, A rusted mist that rises from the stone— We thought the grave was waiting in the sky, But it was rising from our flesh and bone. Look how the quiet cracks the concrete floor. The bedrock stirs, an ancient, dreaming head. The blind roots stretch beneath the basement door, Not seeking water, but the things we said. And in the shadows where the dampness clings, Oily black shelves of teeth begin to grow, Mimicking ears to hear the forest sing, Breathing a sweetness only dying things can know. Out of the riverbed, the gray mud wakes, Walking in fluid, featureless design. A melting shape that shivers and it shakes, Weeping wet sediment, a ghost without a spine. They wander through the grid of cold streetlamps, Desperate to steal the framework of a man, To press their liquid faces to our hands And take the calcium before they fade again. The perfume of the earth is turning inward. It is no longer rising from the grass. It leaks from the marrow, It radiates from the skin. My internal geography is yielding to the quiet. The limestone claims my bones. The coppery mist was my own breath. A sudden flash. A violent, silent scrub. The world is washed of all its iron and stone. No broken glass. No debris in the mud. Just empty woods where ancient trees have grown. The air is fresh, a pristine, quiet floor, As if the world was never touched by pain... A silent forest standing evermore, And we were nothing but a passing stain.