The starved waste barricaded inside of nothing left. No boundaries are everywhere.
The outer rings are uninhabitable, except for suicide by desertion, show trials, and
Forced labor. Punishment. Theft is not preventable. Stuff is broken, burned, dead,
Missing. No one eats and strolls. The brigade scrambles and runs, flanks and hides.
Forty days and nights are doubled, as incursions swarm the blown October factory.
The inexperienced fight room to room, hardly aging, and die badly in the process.
If it takes a fortnight to take a corridor, by that time, the whole passageway is quite
Jammed with dead soldiers, a crawlspace of flesh, the living endure, on their bellies.
The dead become a measure of space, and time is what happens to the bodies, next.
For example, in a day the dying will be dead and the fresh reserves will be wounded.
Despite how bloodshed hounds every patrol, starvation’s emergency works in slow.
The killings happen in a bland circumstance, without desperation, just exhaustion.
Desperate fighting curdled on the autumn in the slapstick year, as it foams and dies.
The slapstick year perished, after some million improbable acts commingle upon it.
The combat stomachs the end’s blandishments sprayed across history’s body room.
If not the crucified, who so the fateful, is awarded a medal, for with bare hands—?
Everything is permitted. Christ warns. His love cannot be revoked in the after-fact.
In the harvest of parables, one of disillusion is told, in the castle laced with retreats.
Among the harvesters, some hung their heads and some others hanged themselves.
Among those with ears to hear, some plugged them and some others cut them off.
For let no one who does not receive the message reside in the bitter understanding.
Bring what will a great reconciliation, terrible ebbs, chopping off one’s own head.
The message starves desire, hand to mouth, and is a testament to the cruelty of joy.
No attempts are made to assemble the rooms, the bodies, the living, and the dead.
Matthew Moore is the author of a poetry collection, The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam (Nevada). He is the translator of Opera Buffa by Tomaž Šalamun (Black Ocean) and Padova by Igo Gruden (Adjunct).
