The Dark Hour

Joseph Dante

July 2, 2014

We are convinced Jung is the cobbler
of this desperate fable:

Begin with a crack,
a trigger to a vital.

La petite mort is a must to sex
our shadows, the hour between
hours that allows us weapons from
the armor of interrupted adolescence.

A cold sea to continue:
our facets rise like curious merfolk, tattooed
with a doctor scribble—we must have been
young or writing with our left hands. There is
never recognition to our old language, so
we anticipate mythology:

Seiryu, Thoth, Parvati

mine to make,
our earliest idols
as film-glossed infants.

All the tragedy—
of being looped in careens,
salivating at clocks,
while all the coherents sleep—
punches out our masks, the diamonds
turning to reveal the other facets.

We are all in a dormitory
smelling of leftover tea and sweat,
looking at one person

at one angle at one time.

You turn and the slash of opaque portrait is lost,
only a stitching of glints
left in its place.
Persona is too weak
a word for a wheel always spinning
the electric, always mad with tangles that refuse
to blossom like vessels.

When you think it’s come to a full stop
you learn how your friends can claim only one,
but you can fuse.
You think of a wardrobe that is piled
high, most pieces never worn.
Most gone with the seasons.

Apathy is our sworn enemy—
zombies are useless in a corporal turbulence
that demands roots and life between life.

Everyone swallows the question of when.
when the vanishing will appear
when language doesn’t consist of only names
when coffins will fill with the dead
and not the dreaming
when promise is a sunrise without
the toothed threat of another
frozen twilight

Doubt, that perhaps Pavlov’s daughter
is the seamstress here instead:

In the end, we hope for amnesia
for ourselves just as much, if not more,
as memory for our country.

If anything, give us this erasure:
no more clocks
turning us ravenous as the claws
that have come for us
with our thinning hands
turning and throwing.