Untitled
a cap of night
cold and icy swept by tangles of wire
and rickets
the unsettled courses the many empty hands
of the workers leaving empty factories
forever
Untitled Construction v. 1
I persist
beneath your dragon fly hips
like a poet in velveteen trousers*
waiting on your cruel secrets
to unravel the coded tones
where I have loved you
on river-less nights
I have witnessed
too many migrations
to be holy (wholly)
responsible
for you
*Soviet indictment of Osip Mandelstam
“tanka”
cry into yourselves
a light of carnival candles
burned in ruined cities
history claps its jaws
around its paper people
untitled
all them wars
and winners
the final traitors
around which the universes eat
easily become hung
by their lips
and hieroglyphs
2046 (a vision)
1.
there was smoke
and shrill yammering;
nakedness
clowns of skin
and stovepipe
in their costumes
of armored jackets
and coats
broke upon the masses
with a fevered roar
and murdered
the workers took up arms
before their flags were starved
at the end of their flagpoles
how they fought
and cried
in half jerks
amid the blows
and great weapons fell
from the sky
into the alleys
and neighborhoods
where streets and buildings
cracked
until none were left whole
and the wind
filled the sky
with pigeon tailed cloth
2.
then
there was lightning
from low pinched clouds
and the nothing white shapes
of tumbleweeds
began to populate
the vast autopsied spaces
there were ghosts
and the ghosts of towns
and bodies
sometimes
of children and horses
and men
and women
preserved
in their ragged clothing
talismans
of dead butterflies
hanging from their secrets mouths
3.
mark their names
on our bodies
our holy martyrs
in lines written and touched
by the last vocabularies of modernity
rogues of insurrection and rush
rotted away like the waters
there are wolves
in the valleys
Mike Linaweaver is a member of Industrial Workers of the World, poet and zine maker originally from the Smoky Hill River region of Central Kansas. In December 2012 he founded the Strike Syndicate collective with a small group of artists and writers. His written work has appeared in ditchpoetry, Sleet Magazine, The Magill Review and Epigraph Magazine. His short story “Are You Alright?” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. A series of his photographs was featured in Anti Heroin Chic. He resides in South Texas.