Poetry Blog by Zach Dafoe

it is with a morose gratitude 
that I am to dispense justice 
like a drug
at the hurlish demands 
of screeching bicuspids 
unaware of the lurch :
the shuffle of their own cloven hooves 
at the trough of the damned 

"to death," 
you declare
eager to eat the softened bones 
of your own impunity 
"To life"
a toast raised as a scythe falls 
and another trauma is passed
like blood thru...

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sedate 
drams dript in ductal work 
forced to come out where they don't belong 
staining the untreated woods:
cedar bearing witness 
drained languid 
and hollow 
in the vacuum of a needle. 

months pass like days
 the same as hours the same as 
bedsores

tho as sweet as sleep may be 
ive never been more tired 
static hanging beneath my eyes 
in long and loping waves
(90.9, music t...

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behind a banner 

woven with us

a strength greater than us each 

now living in us all. 

our bodies may go ashen

'neath the rigors of our peril

but the masts of what we stood for

shall sail our souls far beyond 

where we fell. 

and lo

tho widows wept 

we are the history of runes 

tracked nameless in the mud 

burned true in a crucible

carried on wit...

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gripped in hands so paper dry and thin
inscribed a letter, these words scrawled out within
so plain, so haunting, so sinister
so monumental to my mountain of shame and sin.

sealed and stamped, bearing no name
no return address, none to blame
but the matte page, moonbeam bright
from the hands and eyes of a confidant
shipped here from overnight

perhaps a bride was in mail order
gaining...

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beneath veneers and gallows' grins 

rests 

An underworld of chiding hymns 

breaths 

taken jagged between razor hail

depths 

of pulses oscillating there.

an ocean of parapets

surging to a wave so big

you could live a lifetime before it breaks 

these cherished, rooftop conversations 

champions of these ides of summer 

buried in that 3am sincerity 

fou...

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standing on a scaffold, looking down at steel cables while a technician and i engage in smalltalk. He reaches into a pulley box that looks like it should be holding reels of film 

he disassbles the pulley box covers and pulls one of the steel cables 

a distorted face of an unkempt man spools forth, caught between the pulleys, stretched.

He looks so tired

talking to a hea...

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A last letter
Like everything that cut me, deep and true, just follows the same long-dead scars, now -- the underground tunnels of being run thru, over and over again: overfilled with joy, burdened with hate, crippled with fear, twisted by love. 
now there's just a body, and I live with it, and there's a sequence of events that happens to it that are resolved in chronological order. 

what som...

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trains crossing blacked out streets 
mournful howls , stark in the slick obsidian
of deadened stories, and hardened hearts
a thousand miles of ire cast in cooling: 
the warmth of bodies wistful for sleep backed 
by a hapless sliver of ivory 
mists roiling up and up like a damp collective sigh
frozen by shock
in time. 

and in time all things lose their pallor 
their color 
desaturated ...

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the chafe of a collar
a road paved in lead
slow, convenient poisons
with the promise of paradise 

how long can you put off wearing your own skin
putting on such efforts to twist and loop
to contort and choke
to asphyxiate with a smile
buried beneath alien layers 
staring down and in on you, vapid, and vast 
while your body is

 piloted

buying expensive cigarettes and sandals
adJU...

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fog condensed 

percolated upon the brows

of fallen kings: 

that we descended like spiral staircases

wherein every step 

suspicion creaks like bone 

sheathed just-so

 we are unknown

a swath of heads 

taken, cackling in the streets 

bobbing in gutters, downwind and downgrade 

before meeting Death; 

pummeled and pestled 

squashed, pressed into mortar, 

d...

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I'm at that age now
where the people I watched wed
are filling for divorce.

it bores a hole, similarly gauged 
to commune with gravity
clutching spaces, knuckles' wide 
between pauses:
breathless moments of wherewithal
sentiment and statement, emptied 
poorly lit podiums, stood up to greet a moonless night.
from deep within newly parched lips they ask :
"what do we do now?" 
Never a ...

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I'm the bone on which you could make a wish

split into twins, so I may resonate

where Fates lay, in doorways wreathed

festooned in dreamsilk and bootstraps

cinched down into the bite sized truths

of choice 

Here Lies Thy Voice

spider stingers and the spittle of birds 

ingredients for a loss of words 

in the face of a roiling fleshy wave

of bad news ; 

The...

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A truth born of molars: 
people are fickle and their feet will stake them, always, in fairer weather. They do this as our ungulate friends do: grazing from pasture to pasture. 

We re hard-pressed, in life, to find people who move through the action of their eyes, upright and ahead, instead of the idleness of shuffling feet; we are hard-pressed to find people who act on principle instead of out...

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'we convinced the serpent to pull us across 
we took on water and ships were lost 
stuck trekking thru a bog that went so deep 
screams from helheim could be heard from below 
each time the surface broke 
And our men, carrying pieces of our ship 
above their heads 
could feel the slain and bloated bellies of history 
beneath their feet.
Tho we pulled out our lesser men 
sunk to the chin,...

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gone days 
of a whispered rack, lashed 
against obsidian history 
misunderstood. 
these ropes weren't made to slip over my wrists 
but that's what god invented nails for.

dawn days
breaking , split gut and glowsticks 
cured ham and other salted relics :
tryptophobic abstracts
tiger traps to tiptoe over 
the weight of legends heavier 
than bruised absconding feet 

colored nights 
...

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eyes roll west, 

we see synapses dimly firing at easy targets and cheap jokes, teeth chattering, white and sharp, hungry for derision

for anything else but the terrifying bog

of what it is to be a human being in control of your own life.

instead, let's laugh at the tumbling waves of pending disaster

narrowly skirting by our lives each and every single day, pretending that ...

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I've only awoken on the sidewalk once 

And once wasn't enough .

a black string is caught in the small hairs on my arms 

cooling dews, falling: a near palpable mist 

whirring and chittering insects

like collections calls 

i can feel broken glass filling my pockets 

unsent text messages to blocked numbers 

i cant remember who fired the first shot 

but in cer...

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