I found out they’d been grinding chickens up behind my house.

Spent egg hens,

throwing them into the woodchipper live by the thousands

cheaper than the slaughterhouse.

What do you think I did when I found that out.

You may touch me now, I am tame.

The roses had

seemed to me like torches,

till the wind came and blew them away.

There’s no middle ground,

only things and the soul

at a vast unbridgeable distance from them,

which my friend JB once noted

before jumping—

 Stiffneck,

this is it, that lilac

floating along the black water—

The clouds were not lit, on either side.

I probably want what Moses wanted.