Palimpsest 2.0

0:44

Wrote it in pencil 'fore the thought was even placed

the graphite ghost persists through every page thats been erased

Every hole they dug became the stage theyd consecrate

read the residue. the interest accrues with weight

 

The craftsman kept the last good chisel in a tin

the edge honed sharp enough to split a quip and grin

from teeth too precise to begin on anything less genuine

than what the stone concealed so half his discipline

looked barren to the critics who conflate discipline

dissolving with the drought, unaware the discipline

of marble is its own a surface kin

to silence one that gives itself to genuine

patience only orion logic glancing in

the wrong half of the dark, youll find nothing therein

but tilt the patient neck and the myth begins again

the belt, the sword, the hunter permanent within

the winter sky, not given, but attended in

the way that medicine attends, though genuine

attendance isnt visible, arts discipline

dressed as absence, so the work looked thin

until the marble opened like a discipline

of love expressing finally what love had kept within

and what he left looks like the stone chose discipline

but really its just love that wore its skin

 

The moon dont argue with the tide

it pulls. the coast decides.

Most laws of nature dont require compliance.

The ones that break become the finest science.

 

Wrote it in pencil 'fore the thought was even placed

the graphite ghost persists through every page thats been erased

Every hole they dug became the stage theyd consecrate

read the residue. the interest accrues with weight

 

The photograph lies honest by the frame of what it claimed

the flash pressed out the afternoon, the shadow went unnamed

the absence went unfiled and the committee then acclaimed

the image as the record, signed and certified, inflamed

with certainty whatever shadow filled the frame

was reclassified as background and the background got reclaimed

as context but the context was the wound that bled and maimed

the particulars from record still the record stood, remained

optics over organs, every decade, same

the wright brothers bore the shame of dreamers who were tamed

by gravity until the gravity was named

in lift coefficient icarus got framed

by ovid as the kid who overreached but blamed

the wrong party, daedalus, who gamed

the narrative built the maze stayed on earth, proclaimed

himself the craftsman shipped a wing with no disclaimed

liability inside no caution named

or clause explained he silence in the blueprint maimed

the son the aegean did the rest and bore his name

a body of water with a body to the name

 

Theres a word for a page thats been written

scraped clean, and written again

the ghost of the first hand bleeds through

and warps what the second hand says

call it history. call it inheritance.

call it what the living have claimed

from the residue of those before them

who convinced them it was theirs to name

 

Finished off the last of what was stored inside the fridge

cold ambition, three day old resolve across the edge

of every conversation where he'd promised to abridge

the monologue but thought condensed along the ledge

to something intricate as escher logic at the wedge

between impossible and built the staircase hedged

in on itself ascending nowhere and the privilege

of that was the point some architecture is the bridge

between two places that dont actually share a ridge

he argued with the calendar the way youd dredge

a silt thick river just to see what laid embedded

at the bottom of the february pledge

he lit the resolution with a match, the shredded

promise pressed like flowers in the margin decorative, embedded

evidence of april when you find it he was headed

nowhere fast, which is to say exactly where hed threaded

every road back to the room, the pen, the well worn bedded

groove of the familiar where the most is said in

what gets left the graphite on the page beneath the page

the first draft of a self before the self gets staged

before the flash erases what the afternoon had aged

to something honest this is it the residue of rage

distilled to patience, patience to the work, the work to age

the age to archive, archive to the palimpsest of page

 

So here it stands the palimpsest of all displaced

original and borrowed, thoroughly worn and traced

the ghost of every draft still bleeding through the face

Find him in the friction where the graphite meets the page