there will be no catching of your breath/ you are only along for the ride which is code for don't speak/ barely dancing in the shadows is not unlike a bag filled with masks/ if not snakes/ i'm autistic/ i don't even think in text/ my brain deals specifically in images just like this one/ suspiciously ubiquitous, war times ten is the color of the Xrayy (my word, my spelling get over it), bends and absorbs exactly in the same way the body, the shell, the shell games, the secrets, the recoveries of the thing, the juice of it, untombed, untombed juice/ crowjuice/ these crows and i/ and snow/ the crows do not migrate/ i see them every day, usually by noon, the crows come out/ this year they're telling the story of the coyotes who have pups in spring/ mine are down a path of rocks that have always reminded me of sunlit marble temples to athena who will have her way with hecuba while most of them will die before july/ if there is a god, and there is no such animal, it would be because it would have to be a coyote and all the masks they slip on before they leapt into the shrunken head of time/ if i find the stuff of them, I will dig a grave/ it's kinda what I do/ it's my job to dig graves for the graveyard/ the writer ones are in the freezer waiting to be resurrected/ my entire world is an x-rayy, and a mountain of them, and i will do whatever the fuck i want to do, there is nothing routine here/ it's all about the mask/ i understand completely that to normals/ all my passages to wars, specific wars, not war as ubiquitous/ but war/ we do not understand that moving forward does not necessarily mean that your knight and your bishop and your king and your rook will all be moving forward at the same time/ someone threw a stake into your heart/ i'm the one who dug your grave/ they want all of us to dig the same grave/ have the same names/ i wear the masks so i might seem to be someone who knows nothing about whatever it is you are talking about/ in books i get to have the same skin/ have the same garbage pickup every monday morning/ exactly at nine and then at supper time, and then the garbage comes for you/ and authority says we are stamping out the garbage, usually, they mean the people you love/ or hated whatever is appropriate/ like i would know/ but i do not know what is always appropriate i don't love anyone/ it's a ship of fools, romeo/ you do not owe anyone an explanation/ moving forward is a cultural ideology/ you can sleep now/ i will take on the characteristics of the mask as masque/ as sunlit silence, as the fading town was but the ground, the one we put the bones into, i will still feed the coyotes in the spring because just keeping one pup alive is everything we can do/ -- tim barrus