Flails, the whiteness, the flowers

of the promised land: and all

you hoard, crumbling at the brink

of breath. For a single word

in air we have not breathed, for one stone,

splitting with the famine

inside us—ire,

out of bone’s havoc, by which we kin

the worm. The wall

is your only witness. Barred

from me, but squandering nothing,

you sprawl over each unwritten page,

as though your voice had crawled

from you: and entered the whiteness

of the wail.