Para-Axiomatic

You have your poor, dead dummy look,
whitened through the lens, a faded dirndl
banishing your excoriated, branded whole
to torn-edged snaps in moleskin notes,
by women paled to death through romance.

These are stolen photos, unfamiliar made-up,
reduced to tours of lichen-covered milestones,
buffed smooth by many, listless hands
that would dig you up, and polish bones
and label you exquisitely in black and white.

Your journals, emulated, have darkened,
yellowed as the acid takes chemical revenge
on buried notebooks, merges ink and paper
of these dramas into dust and earth,
and coverings for faster lives than yours.

A history of primordial things is given,
all Identity so proved with writing.
A horned thing stands unmoved like thunder,
in the rain and noise of breaking minds,
to spook you with a board of yes and no,

for ideas taken by the smiling girl-primes
of this school, to darkened rooms for testing
theories of afterlives and how to live by spirits
stolen from the back of thought and words,
objective worlds of how we see everything.

A dash, expanding smoke, the open mind,
the poison stream of quiet, ending softly,
the slow rise of the earth to you and scream,
the gulp of water and another easy end,
the wish for all stopped dead at one command.