who am I this time

checked my ID
reaffirming this identity
simple in its deceits
my humanness always questioned
my memory occluded
come this day
the irish poet died only
74 he had a good
piece posted in the story
these pieces are still just a list
the jigsawed memories from these days
but also from that other time
or many other times
versions of the self
page after page of this shit
separated primarily by material
objects the candle burns
no specific time is checked
on the old form the dates are changed
at random anyway the various
partners paid to obfuscate
and was anyone in my life
trustworthy? was anyone of them
actually involved with me? this
fear is just another burden
who is it you think you have chosen to be?

the girl in the sand

can I work through the ancient language
be an interpreter of a lost heart?
can I see those images of the lathe turning
in the dark, revising the serried
outlines of the girl disinterred, fictive
illicit, burnt into the conscience? was
it really my work, my stark dreaming
of the menarchal child destroyed by
someone's confined understanding
in the daily day of here and then?

so I felt responsible
only for thinking it possible
and then it came true and truer
all around me the same story
repeated its details different and
varied yet the girl I met the
girl next door it happened to her
her crippled father wrecking her
very flesh not a murder
but too close to dissolution

we all struggle back from this loss
it is a version not of defeat but of
mourning
she mourned those days gone now
she mourned a different way of
loving her dad
she mourned all this yet I came along
with my story of the dead girl and
nothing was healed nothing really
changed perhaps the face of the
source of loss has been varied
varied and treated to his own loss
everything loss these many years the
girls the women the female being
murdered in nearly every part
of these thousands of days

I am savaged with self knowledge
trusting only to the attempt to live truthfully
the mourning continues doves leaving
the scene are you still out there
Miranda, the girl in the sand?