I. The Boy Who Keeps

The key was given once to a boy who stood
inside the library, between the stacks.
It opened what could not be understood
except by one who never answered back.
It was not small. It spanned the years and ground
alike, and waited for the proper strain.
It opened you. That knowledge would be found
in time, through him, where loss becomes domain.
She placed him there because he did not sleep,
because he would not turn when called away.
He kept what you would lose and could not keep
and stood where dust and naming briefly stay.
The key was what you were and would become.
She gave it to the boy. He waits. It comes.

II. The One Who Takes

The key lay pressed against his face, a mark
the body bore as plainly as a scar.
A wound held fast within the listless dark,
where pain instructs and nothing drifts too far.
She placed it there because that place would make
it cost to give, and cost again to keep.
Its forging was not his; he stayed awake
to guard what others lose or leave to sleep.
You placed it where the breath and word align,
where flesh gives way and speech becomes a test.
You took his watch. The hours fell in line.
He turned, or slept. The duty passed.
You are what he became when it was done.
You take the wound. The watch. The work. The sum.

While a butterfly in Guatemala
stirs up the beginnings of El Niño,
a young man takes a comb from his wallet,
smoothes his black hair in a cockpit window,
and anticipates virgins in heaven.
Like Prometheus discovering fire
or Moses coming down from the mountain,
he radiates a prophetic desire
which inures him to fear of injury.
He could walk barefoot for days in the sand,
or survive weeks without ever eating,
or could simply resolve to understand
the controls in the flight simulator,
which stand between him and his creator.

I. Lesson

Berlin hums beneath my skin. The windows sweat.
A train moves east through frost and signal-light.
I write a line and lock it in a desk
where names are folded out of sight.
They tended me with razors and a bowl
then called me Joan and washed me clean of hair:
the blade cooled down; the water kept me whole.
I learned how names are borne, but not repaired.
I rode the war on borrowed light,
a Red ghost jumping boxcars with the news,
the folded paper in my coat at night,
a faded truth I carried—and abused.
Return to them. Return where orders start,
where mothers sing and break the soldiers’ hearts.

II. Proof

I watched their hunger gather like a choir,
the stairwells loud with breath and lifted hands.
They wanted truth the way a city wants a fire—
not light, but proof that order holds command.
They came in packs, their chanting loud as law,
the hallways ringing ribs and booted breath.
The room took heat; the men were made to draw
a line between obedience and death.
I went with them. I felt the iron sing.
My hands were clean. They did not shake.
The fire raged and cost us everything;
we fed it names until the night would break.
No mercy followed. Only this remained:
we burned the night, then asked it to be named.

The art of the second was born of need:
to sever the head—let it descend
to the retainer’s lap with proper speed
still hitched to the flesh it must transcend,
a newborn’s tether, pale and stubborn, caught
between what leaves and what refuses still.
Mercy and taste: the blade that answers thought,
the practiced hand that sanctifies the skill.
One final stroke to staunch a benediction
or to close the mouth before it speaks in vain—
and spare the watchers any fleck of sin;
the blood directed to a higher plane.
The breath revoked, the body’s work undone—
the tether breaks. There is no resurrection.

In the back room stood an altar in the dark
where good men weighed the cost of what they made;
they bartered one another part by part
and called the bargain work, the loss a trade.
It passed as work at first: a daily run,
a language shaped to hours, sums, and need.
Good men replaced good men, and one by one,
their names reduced to figures on a sheet.
One day they chose a righteous man instead
and named the choice expedient, not base.
In time, the work required a hand that bled;
the careful men learned execution’s face.
From then on, meetings logged the downward turn;
their words were sealed like prayers, then left to burn.

He kept a briefcase in his room,
a numbered lock, a loaded gun.
“What’s in it?” Nothing. Just a shrug
the way a monk seals up a tomb.
A year of nights, a silent proof;
a secret tucked behind the rug.
Too young for badges or the trade,
all bone and reach in undershirt,
just street enough to film a world
where men spoke easy into tape—
gang lore, a birthday stolen late.
I guessed at film, or cash, or dirt.
He palmed a cigarette and sipped
his gin, then warned me. Click by click.

or Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

I waded in the sea when the great fire raged
and gazed at the purple belt of Orion,
too far to hear the cries of the first brigade
and the deeds of Ofonius and his men.
My wife had whispered in my ear too late: flames
like wild horses circling the poet’s hill
scattered across the gardens of Mæcenas,
idling only when the winds grew still.
Yet I rode swiftly past the burning tower,
far above the embers on the Palatine—
I sang to my children in their woeful hour,
moved by Lucan’s tongue and Seneca’s mien
to comfort every orphan in the Field of Mars
and avenge their naked grief beneath the stars.

There is a window cut below the shin
where flesh and omen meet in calibrated light—
the measured grind of progress under skin,
a city yoked to burden, not to sight.
When one arm lifts, the trusses misalign,
their angles learning panic by degrees;
each span goes taut, a nerve along a spine,
each joint remembers weight as if it sees.
He coughs. The ovens answer with a roar.
Bellows collapse. The horizon flashes red.
The Captain mans the gait once more
and shifts the towers toward the city’s edge.
The legs descend. What held becomes a fall,
story by story, crumbling wall by wall.

I. The Map

Bunker-busters, daisy-cutters, kill-boxes, drones
slide into nerve, a gospel learned by rote:
desire refined to numbers, weight, and zones,
the body lifted cleanly into statute.
We sell it bright—the tagged, the priced, the blessed;
maps pulse, a breath held under screens.
A crater opens: children stand half-dressed,
all orphaned by the grammar of machines.
We know the land by how it takes the blow—
its passes flare, its lakes consumed by flame;
the caves inhale, trade routes go dark and slow
as patience tightens margins into gain.
We kill democratically—fire, food, and law—
and call the silence afterward withdrawal.

II. The Ground

The morning came incorrect. The light was thin.
Smoke stayed where rooms had been and would not lift.
We walked the street and found the street within
itself, collapsed by heat, reduced to drift.
A kettle split. The clock had lost its face.
Walls kept their angles. Doors would not align.
A book lay opened to a missing place,
its margin blistered past the final line.
We counted shoes, then stopped. The count was wrong.
A child’s name would not fit inside the mouth.
The well ran black. The radio stayed on,
repeating weather no one needed south.
Fire took the rest: the beds, the dates, the proof.
We stood. The day went on. The sky stayed blue.