Sean Bolton
Gone Native
Was a world of glass traffic
where name redounded against
the heap of human movement.
To be and to use. The night
blown apart by moral shrapnel.
This sky is broken water: God
mounting an absurd microscope.
Feeds the prick of order to
the gaping mouth of death.
An insistence of blue eyes and
freedom and a fetish for prisons.
My nightmare of comfort in
a womb that can no longer exist.
I am become the proof of language,
word my shadow on fractured stone.
This is the edge of mind’s anchor,
a last chance to remain undivided.
I genuflect in this cathedral of rot-
green, of bayonet and gasoline.
I pray to walk unrooted from this
mountainside. In the stretched time
of trip-wire consciousness, I send
my bird of name above the trees
for sunlight. Sponge of my spirit
seeping through waterlogged eyes.
I am here eternal: now grown
to jungle—now subterranean
and taken home.
Sean Bolton is the author of the chapbook A Passion (Gold Wake Press, 2010). He holds both an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) and a PhD in Literature from Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in Prism International, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Otoliths, among other journals. Bolton teaches in the English Department at Santa Fe College.
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