Here and There

Here is where you crouch and kick
You shatter the shins of cautious thought
As it circles around you at an unsafe distance

Here is where the dust is churned
Turning the air deep butter brown
Painting skin and cloth in clay
But leaving the whites starkly untouched

Here is where you growl to yourself
And so to everyone in that voice of lost thunder
Of when the angry sky twitches and stamps a foot

Here is where your your eyes and head unite
Racing against the confinement of degrees
In that rolling hunted bovine way. Cornered and dangerous.

Here is where words in their crisp uniforms
And pastel blue helmets, jackknife their rifles
Spraying haphazard bullets, to mow an unwanted lawn

Here a betrayal so unlooked for that each
Syllable is its own shock. A fresh needle in the eye
As I mumble my peacekeeping with shifting feet
And pretend not to feel each metal Judas kiss.