The Once and Future Dayspring

V.

The way it is— we are too weak to save anything.

The way it's been all this time,
despite visions lodged in honeycomb memory...

The way it's gone,
we spent so much time in our headship
we quit charting the constellations
and grew used to navigating by our names.

What fool ever fell in love with a game?

Swirling green and gold catching quick
on the globe, Dayspring, Dayspring,
creating a new circumference,
never catching on to the difference.

To love that, the way it is— Dayspring—
always witness to the rise of some fallen thing.

Powerless to row back against ceaseless resistance.
Powerless to preserve any kiss.
Powerless to defend the squishy bodies of them I love.
Powerless to freeze my wishes in the menagerie.
Powerless to do without, without, without.
Powerless to magick kindness out of malice.
Powerless to stop the tar from bubbling.
Powerless to go where day demands nothing.
Powerless to reverse cuts glimpsed on skin.
Powerless to will the wheeling needle backwards.
Powerless to rally nerves out of nervousness.
Powerless to numb my sex senseless.
Powerless to bandage the gilded bleeding of fate.
Powerless to intervene in my parent's meeting.

Powerless to stop them from committing the far-reaching accident of creating me.