I Couldn't Fix Myself

My scars found me
growing new fingerprints
and stayed put anyway.

Time was a sadist that
left my worn feet
calloused like cracked acorns.

I tried to change
broken pieces of fossils
into gushing plasma.

My own hands could not
knead the bread
that would nourish.

I could not oil a rusted
plough that refused
to turn a parched earth.

A dusty bookshelf would not
offer up luminous poems of
alchemy and transformation.

I ran to emerald mountains
only to find tarnished
fragments of jewels.

Ever the same incisions
sliced and stitched in a
twisted surgeon’s configuration.

Unchanging, unmoving
recycled parts that rotated
like a vintage jukebox

singing an overplayed song
that refused to
fall off the charts.

No movement without the Mover.
No virgin landscape without the Magician.

An arid geography of
shifting sand dunes that
changed invisibly

but never misplaced
even those most nameless
grains of sand.

And so it was I that
circled a fresh kill
endlessly, only to find

a ribcage of hollow bones
guarding a phantom heart that
once knew an unsteady rhythm.