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They pile the barley in stacks and the unspoken halves

are greater. The season is an ongoing industry now:

bagging soils in woven things, marking the long meridian,

skimming the bitchy river for what it gives up.

And from deep in this empire someone says “growth

opportunity” or “glow unimpeded” or “afterlight lapping

the long valley” and irrespective of which they’re not wrong.

If I had to pony up, come good, I wouldn’t need much room.

Sometimes the spirit wakes me in the night, high on NyQuil,

and I front myself in the mirror, as one does, seeing fuck knows

what, seeing what it concerns me to see­—a Prince of Denmark

once, a Duke-elect of nothing. The self has bequeathed me a tin pot

republic. I address it in the rhetoric of the drowned horse,

the grandiloquence of dust stalled in the gloss.

If I’ve become a relic in my own house it’s because I’ve wished it.

The weather reckons me forward.