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The Idol of the Tribe


ISSUE:  Summer 2020

 

I look at you with my vexed eye.
I look at you with my hostile eye.
I look at you with my hostile and vexed eye.
My hostile, vexed eye is a wrench.

My vexed eye is a socket wrench.
My vexed and hostile socket-wrench eye twists 
the bolt that hinges your mandible free 
from its frozen grooves.

You scream, but we go on turning, 
I and my eye. 
I know what I’m into.
I know what I’ve been put here for.

I’ve been put here for you.
The ducks in the marshland line up
by the mallows they resemble, but
no miracle of nature can delay me.

Snow, rain, heat, etc.  
can’t stay me from the completion 
of my dismantling you, my
being rid of you. 

I remove your jaw. I lay it aside.
Your neck bone I disconnect
from your shoulder bone, 
your shoulder bone I disconnect 

from your breastbone,
your breastbone from your backbone,
your backbone from each rib,
each rib from the sound of your Lord.

Your tinted waters laden with debris 
stream from your split flanks.
Your truths take on their true proportions. 
How small they always were— 

not false, but trivial.
I make a heap out of you. 
You’re not dead, of course.
You said yourself you can never die,

so that was never the point.
The point is this: Here, around me,
you’re disassembled, you’re a junkyard,
you’ve been sacrificed.

 

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