The Muck Before Spring

I.
Today I feel the Autumn in March.
Why do I write? To furnish the emptiness.
Sometimes it feels like home.

My hands are cold.
No warm back will feel them today.
You can hang curtains in the emptiness,
fill it with many distractions,
but one good wind and your house collapses,
and you're out on the streets
or walking a desert,
another tumbleweed.
No Mecca ahead.

Or they drag you from some river,
a worm pudding.


II.
"The silence crunches me until I fit inside my skin.
It planes me, and skin appears.
What is that form within my chaos?
It breathes. It's alive.
It is too wooden for terror:
One thing crunches another in its teeth;
Just the ticking of the clock of nature.
Tock I tick don't know why."
Once created, the thing has to talk.
Don't listen to it.

- James McColley Eilers, 6-10 March 2007