It has been knocked flat—
the line between
collapsed and at rest.

***

How to distinguish
cause and effect without errors
of denying antecedent
or affirming consequent?

Can we dowse that line
between self-flagellation
and self-defense?

What boundary arbitrates
passivity when disability is designed
designated as divine punishment, just
suffering?

***

Let the robots do the work!
if we are made in their image anyways
perfect laborers, needless
of thanks.

Tang ping:
a generation born exhausted,
blamed from birth

like it is the fault of bees
that there are no longer wildflowers
to sustain a stolen sunset.

as though sleeping beauty
was a layabout
and not twice cursed.

***

Why struggle to find it:
that boundary that separates
a pile from a heap
when the house is on fire?

When we might acclimate
to accubation, a clime of rest
as sibling to resist

pacifism in passing
without passing on.

***

The nature of a warrior
has ever been as inscrutable
as any of the other great questions

(so many of them thrown here
like knives, obverse to theme)

and yet we raise our silence to say
we fight by refusing
to stack our spines upright
knowing you will only steal them
to make sticks
to beat the others
into further building blocks

the answer as flat as the page
no more dimensions to harm in

just princeless glass coffins
and apologies for writing
the wrong stories
this three-dimensional harm
grew out of.