The Painted Bark
Painted prey nailed up for show.
Painted hymn. A painted glow.
Severed limb hauled off for trade
shades the throne our fury made.
Kennel-light. A thousand throats.
Hymnals scored in borrowed notes.
Righteous music. Vacant pew.
Sermon for a sky we drew.
Wolves came down the older path.
Fed on starlight. Fed on math.
Took the compass. Took the thread.
We kept barking. Reason fled.
The mouth forgot the older words.
Quarry vaulted. Branches thin.
Hound dissolves where dusk begins.
Sound goes on without a source.
Sound is what we mistook for force.
If this poem said something true to you, the companion essay is in the paid tier — on decoys, domestication, the Norse wolves that eat the sky, and why the wrong tree was never an accident. Paid subscribers keep this work possible.
For every 15 paid subscribers, I become a paid subscriber to another independent writer. The 15-to-1 pledge runs both directions — your support holds my work and seeds the work of someone else fighting the same fight.
or
Beautiful and such great use of vocabulary!!
Reminds of finding a book in Skyrim and how the lore was canon and entirely its own beast in the game.
Or playing resident evil which takes place in an Ivy League school and finding notes the professors behind instead of scientists.
I’m not at all certain what the context for the poem means, so I’m definitely going to read the breakdown on your page.